Technical Evaluation of a Levulinic Acid Plant Based on Biomass Transformation under Techno-Economic and Exergy Analyses

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Abstract

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 × 105 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.

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Meramo Hurtado, S. I., Puello, P., & Cabarcas, A. (2021). Technical Evaluation of a Levulinic Acid Plant Based on Biomass Transformation under Techno-Economic and Exergy Analyses. ACS Omega, 6(8), 5627–5641. https://doi.org/10.1021/acsomega.0c06088

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