IIT researchers find new method to produce sugar substitute from sugarcane waste

A team of researchers at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Guwahati has developed a new method to produce sugar substitute from sugarcane waste.

Called ‘Xylitol’, this sugar substitute has potential anti diabetic effects and overcomes limitations like chemical methods for synthesis of sugar and time delays associated with conventional fermentation process, they claim.

The newly developed, ultrasound-assisted fermentation method utilises sugarcane bagasse (the residue left after crushing of sugar cane) to produce a safe sugar substitute, the institue said in a release issued on Tuesday.

Professor VS Moholkar of Department of Chemical Engineering at IIT Guwahati led the research and the team includes Dr. Belachew Zegale Tizazu and Dr. Kuldeep Roy who co-authored the research papers. This Research was published in two peer-reviewed journals Bioresource Technology and Ultrasonics Sonochemistry.

Highlighting the importance of this research, lead researcher Prof. Moholkar said, “The use of ultrasound during the fermentation process not only reduced the time of fermentation to 15 hours (against almost 48 hours in conventional processes), but also increased the yield of the product by almost 20%. The researchers used only 1.5 hours of ultrasonication during the fermentation, which means that not much ultrasound power was consumed in the process. Thus, xylitol production from sugarcane bagasse using ultrasonic fermentation is a potential opportunity for forward integration of sugarcane industries in India”.

“The present research has been carried out on laboratory scale. Commercial implementation of sonic fermentation requires the design of high power sources of ultrasound for large-scale fermenters, which in turn requires large-scale transducers and RF amplifiers, which remains a major technical challenge” said Prof. Moholkar.