Different biomass conversion strategies for valuable chemical production

• Autores: Llorenç Gavilà Terrades
• Directores de la Tesis: Magdalena Constantí Garriga (dir. tes.), Francesc Medina Cabello (codir. tes.)
• Lectura: En la Universitat Rovira i Virgili ( España ) en 2017
• Idioma: español
• Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Jyri-Pekka Mikkola (presid.), Ioanis Katakis (secret.), Pablo Domínguez de María (voc.)
• Programa de doctorado: Programa de Doctorado en Nanociencia, Materiales e Ingeniería Química por la Universidad Rovira i Virgili
• Materias:
  • Química
  • Ciencias de la vida
    • Microbiología
• Enlaces
  • Tesis en acceso abierto en:  hdl.handle.net  TDX 
• Resumen

  • Biorefinery is a broad topic in constant development with numerous cases of success and failure. Here three different up-to-date strategies for biomass transformation into valuable chemicals have been presented. Albeit, initially, these three strategies do not have straight-forward connection among them, biorefineries cannot be understood without taking profit of all biomass fractions. So the technologies described in this thesis can be fitted in a larger context depending of the desired needs or final product.

    Thus, for instance, one could imagine a plant where: once fermentation of a woody hydrolysate with lactic acid bacteria (Chapter 2) has finished, lactic acid is extracted and afterwards the present furfural is also extracted (if somebody has more imagination, could also think about transforming xylose into furfural previously) and used for hydrogenation (Chapter 4).

    Or, on the other hand, in an alternative imaginary plant, one could take profit of the fractionation capabilities of biomass acetylation (Chapter 3). Once cellulose acetate has been prepared (and upgraded to AMF) the acetylated hemicellulose units (presumably short oligomers or monomers) can also be converted to furfural and be upgraded to pentanediols (Chapter 4).

    Being this said, a brief discussion of the main achieved facts on each chapter will be disclosed in the following lines.

    In Chapter 2, an integrated biomass-to-lactic acid process has been presented. For this, fractionation of woody biomass with ionic liquids was first demonstrated. And afterwards the produced pulps were hydrolysed, finally the hydrolysate was used as carbohydrate source by lactic acid bacteria. Lactic acid bacteria fermentation resulted in successful conversion of glucose into optically pure D-lactic acid. Recalling the requirements for ILs exploitation for biomass treatments mentioned in the introduction, an IL which meets most of these conditions has been studied (e.g. water tolerant, reusable…); here, also biocompatibility has been studied and demonstrated.

    Chapter 3 presents a new interesting approach for the production of a furanic compound from biomass. For this, acetylation of cellulose is posed as an alternative entry point to cellulose hydrolysis. By doing this, cellulose solubility is modified, enlarging the solvent list which can solubilise it. Taking benefit of it, acetic acid is used as solvent and then “acetolysis” of cellulose acetate leads to the formation of acetylated HMF, the so-called acetoxymethoxyfuraldehyde (AMF). Not only this, in this chapter cellulose acetate is prepared from different biomass sources and successfully transformed to AMF.

    Finally, in chapter 4 upgrading of furfural is studied. In this chapter is demonstrated that Co aluminate nanoparticles facilitate, the not easy, formation of 1,5-pentanediol from furfural. Also, in this chapter the influence of the reduction temperature of the catalyst is studied, giving some insight on the segregation of metallic Co nanoparticles, which will ultimately favour 1,5-pentanediol formation.