Abstract
Agricultural waste cow dung was used as feedstock for the production of a high value–added chemical levulinic acid (LA) in dilute acid aqueous solutions. A high LA yield of 338.9 g/kg was obtained from the pretreated cow dung, which was much higher than that obtained from the crude cow dung (135 g/kg), mainly attributed to the breakage of the lignin fraction in the lignocellulose structure of the cow dung by potassium hydroxide (KOH) pretreatment, and thus enhanced the accessibility of cow dung to the acid sites in the catalytic reaction. Meanwhile, another value-added chemical formic acid could be obtained with a yield of ca. 160 g/kg in the process, implying a total production of ca. 500 g/kg yield for LA and formic acid from the pretreated cow dung with the proposed process. The developed process was shown to be tolerant to high initial substrate loading with a satisfied LA yield. This work provides a promising strategy for the value-increment utilization of liglocellulosic agricultural residues.
Highlights
Lignocellulosic biomass is the most abundant biomass in the world, which can be converted into various valuable platform compounds such as furfural, lactic acid, formic acid and levulinic acid by biorefinery processes [1,2,3,4,5]
The production of levulinic acid (LA) has been broadly investigated from a variety of feedstocks such as sugars, cellulose, chitin and raw lignocellulosic biomasses by homogeneous or heterogeneous catalysts [4,5,9,10,11,12]
Lignocellulosic agricultural waste cow dung was used as a feedstock to produce the value-added chemical levulinic acid in dilute HCl aqueous solutions
Summary
Lignocellulosic biomass is the most abundant biomass in the world, which can be converted into various valuable platform compounds such as furfural, lactic acid, formic acid and levulinic acid by biorefinery processes [1,2,3,4,5]. The production of LA has been broadly investigated from a variety of feedstocks such as sugars, cellulose, chitin and raw lignocellulosic biomasses by homogeneous or heterogeneous catalysts [4,5,9,10,11,12]. In the past the increasing for beef and milk has dramatically promoted the development of decades, the cattle industry and leddemand to the production of a great amount of cow dung waste [23]. For the value-increment utilization of agricultural residue cow dung
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