A green chemical production: Obtaining levulinic acid from pretreated sugarcane bagasse

The Bio Based Press wrote "The production of levulinic acid is gaining momentum". Today, researches are focusing efforts to convert biomass on new chemicals platforms, including levulinic acid (LA), which has gained increased attention for being an attractive platform for products with high added value. LA can be obtained through the acid hydrolysis of some types of saccharides such as glucose and xylose, the constituent unit of cellulose and hemicelluloses. In this work, three substantial steps to convert biomass, in this case sugarcane bagasse, in LA were investigated. Sugarcane bagasse was pretreated with acid (121 °C, 1.0 % w/v H2SO4, and 80 min) and alkali delignificated (80 °C, 0.5 % w/v NaOH, and 90 min reaction time) both with 20 % w/v of solids loading. Experiments were carried in a discontinuous reactor at different variations of temperature (160, 170 and 180 °C), acid concentration (3, 7 and 5 % w/v H2SO4), hydrolysis reaction time (55, 75 and 95 min) and substrate loadings (6, 8 and 12 % w/v). This research has demonstrated that LA production at 170 °C, 5% w/v H2SO4, 75 min and 6 % w/v of solids loading conditions achieved a LA yield of 55.00 ± 0.36 % and selectivity about 45.65 ± 0.26 %. © Copyright 2017, AIDIC Servizi S.r.l.