Furfural production from mile-a-minute weed (mikania micrantha) using organic acid from bilimbi (averrhoa bilimbi)

Abstract

Mile-a-minute weed (Mikania micrantha) is an invasive weed with rampant growth which seriously damages the ecosystem. One promising way to control mile-a-minute weed by utilizing it for furfural production because waste of mile-a-minute weed contains a lot of pentosane. In this work, fufural synthesized by using bilimbi (Averrhoa bilimbi) which is an organic acid and environmentally friendly. In this study, mile-a-minute weed (100-70 mesh size), bilimbi acid and salt (NaCl) were reacted in a three neck round bottom flask at 80-140 ºC for 120-330 min. The weight (mile-a-minute weed) to volume (bilimbi acid) ratio was set to be 1:6 at fixed solution volume of 750 mL. Furfural was extracted from water using solvent extraction method employing chloroform as a solvent. After extraction the lower layer would contain furfural and chloroform while the upper layer would contain water. Furfural was purified by evaporating chloroform. The furfural was identified by the acetic aniline colour reaction, infrared spectrophotometer and GC-MS. The highest furfural yield was obtained at 7.2 % for the reation temperature of 100 ºC and reaction time of 300 min.