Process optimization on 5-ethoxymethylfurfural production from cellulose catalyzed by extremely low acid in one-pot reaction

Abstract: With the inevitable depletion of non-renewable petroleum resources and the rising environmental concerns, renewable biomass has been regarded as a potential resource for sustainable supply of biofuels. The development of simple, cheap and sustainable catalytic process for the production of biofuels has become a major target. Among the promising biofuels, EMF (5-ethoxymethylfurfural) has been considered as a new generation of biofuel or fuel additive due to its unique properties, such as its liquid characteristics under room temperature, non-toxicity, high lubricity, stable flashpoint and excellent flow properties under cold conditions. Recently, an increasing number of reports have been focused on the direct conversion of carbohydrates and platform chemicals such as 5-hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF), fructose, sucrose, or inulin into EMF catalyzed by different catalysts. However, from a point of view that raw materials are cheap and rich, it is more valuable to use cellulose or cellulosic biomass instead of model compounds, such as HMF and fructose, for the production of EMF. In the existing researches, cellulose was usually used as raw material to be converted into intermediate product HMF, 5-chloromethylfurfural (CMF) or 5-bromomethylfurfural (BMF), and so on, and then the target product EMF was obtained through the intermediate product. Using cheap and renewable cellulose as the raw material, and ethanol as the solvent, and combining the dehydration of cellulose to HMF, followed by the etherification of HMF to EMF in one-pot, is a more attractive reaction pathway. This one-pot reaction avoids the isolation and purification of HMF, which saves time, energy and solvent. The side reaction of process using extremely low sulfuric acid is slight, in which standard grade stainless steel facility can be used instead of high nickel alloy, which has a significant cost advantage in the equipment. In this paper, sulfuric acid with ultra low mass concentration (0.1% of the mass of ethanol) was used as catalyst to catalyze cellulose and ethanol to produce EMF in one-pot reaction. The effects of temperature, reaction time and substrate concentration on EMF yield were firstly studied and then the response surface methodology was used to design experiments to optimize the reaction conditions. The interactions of factors and the optimum reaction conditions were obtained. The results showed that the reaction temperature was the factor that mostly impacted the one-pot EMF production from cellulose and ethanol catalyzed by sulfuric acid with ultra low mass concentration. The maximum mean EMF yield of 14.93% was obtained under the optimum reaction conditions: reaction temperature of 200 ℃, reaction time of 75 min and substrate concentration of 30 g/L, with the prediction error of 2.03%, which showed that the model had a good fitting property. Compared to other studies, the study showed that EMF can be obtained directly from cellulose catalyzed by extremely low acid in one-pot reaction for the first time. The process conditions for producing EMF from cellulose catalyzed by extremely low acid in one-pot reaction had been optimized. This study can provide reference for the EMF one-pot production from much cheaper and abundant cellulosic biomass such as agricultural wastes catalyzed by sulfuric acid with extremely low concentration.