Preliminary study on ramie retting in supercritical-CO_2 with enzymes

This paper describes an experiment of ramie bast retting treatment with pectinase and xylanase preparations under the conditions of supercritical CO_2 at 35～(55 ℃),7～(15 MPa,) and investigates the survival number of organisms,variations of enzyme activity and the retted effect before and after the treatment.The results demonstrate that the inactivity rate of retting organisms is over 99% under the condition of supercritical CO_2 after one hour.Under supercritical conditions,the stability of non-cellulase varies with its species,xylanase is comparatively stable and its activity decreases by only 1.6%,and pectinase stability is,however,not so good and its activity decreases by 23.79%.The enzymatic retting of ramie in the medium of supercritical CO_2 is beneficial to accelerate the catalytic process and the retting efficiency is increased by 60%～100%.