Levulinic Acid Production from Lignocellulosic Biomass by co-solvent Pretreatment with NaOH/THF

- Lignocellulosic biomass is essential to pretreatment because of having rigid structures and a lot of lignin. Among methods of pretreatment, using THF solvents has the advantage of being easy to reuse. THF (Tetrahydrofuran) used as a co-solvent with water or ionic solvent that is inexpensive and can remove lignin over a wide range of reaction conditions. NaOH (Sodium hydroxide) has been demonstrated to preferentially solvate lignin from cellulose. Thus, NaOH was used as a pretreatment co-solvent for the fractionation of lignin by destroying the ether bond to amend for hydrolysis and expand the surface area of cellulose and hemicellulose. In this experiment, lignin was removed by the NaOH/THF co-solvent pretreatment process to characteristics for the pretreatment and obtain the optimal levulinic acid conversion yield through the acid catalyst conversion process. the NaOH/THF co-solvent system was conducted in various ratios of co-solvent under a total of 16 conditions. And the temperature was 180 celcius during to 60 mins. The optimum condition of co-solvent is NaOH 5 wt%/THF 90:10(v/v%), 76.8% glucan content was obtained through this co-solvent pretreatment, and 90.1% lignin was removed. In the acid catalyst conversion process, which is a subsequent pretreatment process, the experiment was conducted under the conditions of 30 to 90 min of reaction time and 160 celcius to 200 celcius reaction temperature. The optimum condition of acid catalyst conversion process is 60min reaction time under of 180 celcius, and it obtained 84.7% of levulinic aicd conversion yield.