Journal
ACS OMEGA
Volume 6, Issue 8, Pages 5627-5641Publisher
AMER CHEMICAL SOC
DOI: 10.1021/acsomega.0c06088
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- University of Cartagena
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The study analyzed an industrial production process of levulinic acid via acid-catalyzed dehydration, showing promising potential in terms of economic sustainability. The process demonstrated low production cost and reasonable exergy efficiency, making it an attractive alternative for biomass valorization.
Levulinic acid (LA) recently has attracted much attention as a promising biorefinery platform due to its potential to be economical and sustainable. This paper addresses technical, techno-economic, and exergetic analyses of an industrial LA production via acid-catalyzed dehydration. The process was simulated through Aspen Plus, considering a processing capacity of 15,175.60 kg/h of banana empty fruit bunches. The global productivity yield was 25.56%, producing 3883.13 kg/h of LA. The techno-economic analysis evidenced that this process may be an attractive alternative for biomass valorization, considering the obtained financial results. This process's total production cost was 0.178 $USD per kilogram of biomass and a total annualized cost of $USD 29,163,638.95. Exergy analysis revealed that this process had an irreversibility rate of 1.48 x 10(5 )MJ/h. The pretreatment stage presented the lowest exergetic efficiency. Globally, the exergy efficiency was 53.76%, which is within is within the reported results for analogous biomass transformation processes.
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