Tuesday, May 1, 2012: 1:30 PM
Rhythms Ballroom, 2nd fl (Sheraton New Orleans)
Furfural and 5-HMF, derived by hydrolysis and dehydration of sugar polymers in cellulosic biomass, are two important building blocks for production of drop-in hydrocarbon biofuels. However, their yields are currently limited by simultaneous degradation to undesired products due to the presence of acid in the aqueous phase. Nonetheless, furfural degradation could be significantly reduced by simultaneous extraction with an appropriate solvent, as recently shown in a study by Weingarten et al.(Weingarten, Cho et al. 2010) with pure xylose. In this study, simultaneous organic solvent extraction was applied to produce furfural from lignocellulosic biomass, and furfural was further subjected to aldol condensation and hydrogenation for the production of liquid alkanes. Various approaches to enhance furfural yields were undertaken including 1) direct furfural production and simultaneous extraction from cellulosic biomass and 2) hemicellulose sugar extraction followed by furfural production with simultaneous extraction. Optimization of process parameters for simultaneous solvent extraction resulted in about 10% and 35% yield increases for furfural and 5-HMF, respectively. The approach was then extended to making aldol-condensation products from furfural. Co-solvents were also employed to overcome yield limitations of HDA (hydrolysis, dehydration, and aldol-condensation) processes(Pan and Shuai 2011). The possibility to optimize with other process such as hydrogenation will also be discussed.
Key words: furfural, 5-HMF, organic solvent extraction, cellulosic biomass, dehydration, aldol-condensation
Pan, X. and L. Shuai (2011).
Weingarten, R., J. Cho, et al. (2010).