Abstract
Levulinic acid is a carboxylic acid present in industrial downstream. It is an important chemical and can be transformed into various important chemicals such as 1,4-pentanediol, aminolevulinic acid, succinic acid, gamma valarolactone, hydoxyvaleric acid, and diphenolic acid. It is considered one of the top ten most important building block chemicals and bio-derived acids. Levulinic acid can be directly produced using biomass, chemical synthesis, and fermentation processes at industrial and laboratory scales. The biomass process produces the char, whereas the fermentation process generates waste during the production of levulinic acid, leading to an increase in the production cost and waste streams. The separation of levulinic acid from the waste is expensive and challenging. In the present study, reactive extraction was employed using trioctylamine in i-octanol for the separation of levulinic acid. The experimental results were expressed in terms of performance parameters like distribution coefficient (0.099–6.14), extraction efficiency (9–86%), loading ratio (0.09–0.7), and equilibrium complexation constant (11.34–1.05). The mass action law model was also applied and found the predicted values were in close agreement with the experimental results. The mixer settler extraction in series was used to achieve more than 98% separations of acid. Furthermore, the conceptual approach for separation of levulinic acid using a mixer settler reactor scheme was discussed and presented various design parameters including extraction efficiency, diffusion coefficient, equilibrium complexation constant, and loading ratio. The study is helpful in recovering the valuable chemicals present in industrial downstream and reducing their environmental impacts if any.
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The datasets used and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
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The authors are thankful for all the administrative and infrastructural supports to Director, Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology in Nagpur, Maharashtra, India.
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AK: conception of idea and design of the experiments; experimentation and interpretant of data; writing the manuscript. Al: analysed and interpreted the data of HPLC to observe the concentration of levulinic acid. DZS: conception of theory and experiments, supervision, data analysis, writing the manuscript. KLW: conception of theory and experiments, supervision, data analysis, writing the manuscript, and communication.
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Kumar, A., Ingle, A., Shende, D.Z. et al. Perspective of reactive separation of levulinic acid in conceptual mixer settler reactor. Environ Sci Pollut Res 30, 24890–24898 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-022-18794-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-022-18794-y