Effect of oxidative lime pretreatment in a processing reactor on in vitro digestibility of dried date palm leaves

Oxidative lime pretreatment can be an effective method for treatment of lignocellulosic biomass in ruminant nutrition.
The aim of this experiment was to investigate effect of oxidative lime pretreatment on in vitro digestibility of dried date palm leaves.
A completely randomized experiment with a 3×3 factorial arrangement of treatments was conducted using 3 levels of temperature (40, 80, and 100 oC) and 3 time periods (80, 160, and 240 minutes). Pretreatment of leaves was performed in a 2-walled reactor containing 600 ml water and under an oxygen pressure of 6.9 Bars.
Increasing the processing time and temperature caused a significant decreased in lignin content from 13.3% in the unprocessed leaves to 3.6% in date palm leaves pretreated at 100 oC for 240 min (P The results showed that heating up during oxidative lime pretreatment increased the nutritive value of dried date palm leaves.