Open AccessTechnical Evaluation of a Levulinic Acid Plant Based on Biomass Transformation under Techno-Economic and Exergy Analyses
Author(s) -
Samir Meramo,
Plinio Puello,
Amaury Cabarcas
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
acs omega
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.779
H-Index - 40
ISSN - 2470-1343
DOI - 10.1021/acsomega.0c06088
Subject(s) - levulinic acid , biorefinery , exergy , biomass (ecology) , pulp and paper industry , yield (engineering) , environmental science , productivity , production (economics) , waste management , process engineering , chemistry , economics , engineering , biofuel , catalysis , materials science , agronomy , organic chemistry , biology , macroeconomics , metallurgy
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 × 10 5 MJ/h. The pretreatment stage presented the lowest exergetic efficiency. Globally, the exergy efficiency was 53.76%, which is within the reported results for analogous biomass transformation processes.