Rule-Based Generation of Thermochemical Routes to Biomass Conversion

Biomass conversion to fuels and chemicals involves a multitude of oxygen-containing compounds and thermochemical reaction routes. A detailed elucidation of the process chemistry is, thus, a key step in understanding the reaction mechanisms and designing chemical processes in a biorefinery. In this paper, a computational tool, called Rule Input Network Generator (RING), is presented as a platform for modeling diverse homogeneous and heterogeneous chemistries in biomass conversion and automatically generating the underlying complex reaction networks. RING accepts a set of reaction rules and initial reactants as inputs and exhaustively generates the reactions of the system. The reaction center of an elementary step is represented by a SMARTS-like string and identified as a submolecular pattern in a reactant molecular graph using a pattern-matching algorithm. The reaction events are subsequently modeled as a graph transformation system. The generality of this framework was substantiated by the successful application of RING in reproducing the reaction mechanisms of different biomass conversion systems, such as acid-catalyzed dehydration of fructose, base-catalyzed esterification of triglycerides, and gas phase pyrolysis of fatty esters.