Recovery of chemicals from sugar in supercritical fluids for oligochemistry cycle

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

We investigated chemical recycling from sugar in supercritical water, focusing on glycol acid as a biodegradable material. In this research, process conditions are surveyed to recover glycol aldehyde.First of all, we analyzed decomposition process of glycol using micro-reactors. Glycols decomposed to erythrose and then glycol aldehyde by retroaldol reaction. Glycol aldehyde is converted info fructose by tautomerism and finally decomposed into glyceraldehyde and pyruvaldehyde. These reactions were accompanied with dehydration.We estimated the reaction rate and its dependency on temperature and revealed that higher temperature and lower water concentration promotes retroaldol reaction instead of dehydration and tautomerism. The reaction at 450℃ in water with a density of 0.1 g/cm3 produced glycol acid with a yield of 89%. We also confirmed glycol aldehyde reacted into glycol acid by Cannizzaro reaction.The reaction rate was estimated as several tens msec, indicating that small reactor is required to enable industrial processes. We showed that the remained research theme are reaction conditions for conversion to glycol acid, reaction of concentrated reactants for industrial process, and utilization of heat from other industry.