Spent liquor reuse strategy applied to levulinic acid production.

CLAUSER, N.M.; VALLEJOS, M.E.; GUTIÉRREZ, S.

Barcelona

Simposio; International Symposium on Lignocellulosic Materials - JE-IntSympLignCellMat, 10th World Congress of Chemical Engineering; 2017

World Chemical Engineering Council

In Ligno-cellulosic Bio-refinery (LCBR), separationof valuable products from the spent liquor is one of the most important contributionsin processing costs, and for this reason the liquid to solid ratio should to beas little as possible. In this context, reuse of stream liquid isproposed to focus on reducing deconstruction and separation costs of valuableproducts. A sequential batch reaction mode is compared with the conventional batchprocess. A techno-economic analysis was performed for levulinicacid (LA) production from pine sawdust as an example. A sequence of alkalinepretreatment, followed by an acid hydrolysis andseparation method in which furfural is used as solvent as proposed by wasconsidered. A kinetic model, based on chemical representation of theseprocesses was implemented. Selected operating conditions, kinetic constantsemployed for the hydrolysis of hemicelluloses, and yield calculations wereextracted of experimental data from conventional batch process obtained in .