Mesoporous AgNa-mordenite catalysts for the biomass hydrolysis

SOLEDAD ASPROMONTE; ALBERTO ROMERO; MILAGROS VENGHI; ALICIA BOIX; ESTHER ALONSO; M.J. COCERO

Conferencia; 18th International Zeolite Conference; 2016

Actually, the use of biomass as feedstock for the production of fuel, energy and chemicals compounds is attracting the attention such as one of the future technologies that contributes to reducing global warming and building a society less dependent on fossil fuels. Cellulose is the most abundant component in lignocellulosic biomass and therefore appears as one of the most promising feedstock in selective hydrolytic processes to produce fuels and chemicals1. Supercritical water (SCW) have shown excellent capability for cellulose depolimerization due to its interesting properties such as ionic product and dielectric constant. Total cellulose hydrolysis to glucose and oligomers can be achieved with very short residences times, 0.02-0.03 s in ultra-fast reactors2. Under these conditions more than 96% of cellulose is solubilized but the presence of oligomers is still high (>60% of the C in the liquid effluent forms cellulose oligomers). One possible mechanism to solve this problem is the hydrolysis of the cellulose using acid catalysts. Thus, parameters such as particle size, porosity, specific area and surface properties of the catalysts are the key to the development of these processes.In these sense, the mesoporous supports has large pore dimensions and narrow pore-size distributions. The MCM41 materials have steric selectivity in the conversion of sugar molecules3. However, mesoporous silicates are not crystalline materials, so they are amorphous or better glass-like3. Zeolites are indispensable due to their acidity. Hence, the main objective of this work is the use of mesoporous zeolite to complete the total hydrolysis into glucose avoiding degradation, using hot compressed water at 180°C and 5 MPa as reaction medium. The preparation of mesoporous zeolite to combine the performances of both microporous (acidity) and mesoporous (higher specific surface) silicates.