Abstract: In this study, ball milling was used to pretreat the straw biomass in hydrogen production process, the reducing sugar yield was taken as reference. After being smashed the material was observed under scanning electron microscope. In order to optimize the ball milling pretreatment process; DPS analysis software was used to design experiments and analyse the data. The influences of the initial raw material particle size, ball to powder weight ratio and ball milling time on the enzyme saccharification processing were analyzed. It was found that the significant influence factors were the ratio of ball to powder weight. The optimal parameters of ball milling pretreatment were as follows: raw material initial size of 0.45 mm, 20∶1 ratio of ball to powder weight ratio, milling time of 1 h, under this condition, the reducing sugar yield was 74.50%.

Key words: biomass, reducing sugar yield, grain size, ratio of ball to powder weight, milling time