Novel Hybrid Reactive Distillation with Extraction and Distillation Processes for Furfural Production from an Actual Xylose Solution

Furfural is only derived from lignocellulosic biomass and an important chemical used in the plastics, agrochemical, pharmaceutical industries. The existing industrial furfural production process, involving reaction purification steps, suffers a low yield intensive energy use. Hence, major improvements are needed to sustainably upgrade process. In this study, conventional process based on continuous stirred tank reactor distillation columns was designed optimized actual aqueous xylose solution via pretreatment step. Subsequently, reactive (RD) extraction/distillation (ED) configuration proposed for respectively, improve efficiency. RD can remove instantly liquid phase separate heavy components raw stream, while ED with toluene butyl chloride as extracting solvents effectively dilute stream. results showed that hybrid RD-ED using solvent saves up 51.8% 57.4% of total investment costs annual costs, compared Furthermore, environmental impacts were evaluated all structural alternatives.