Simplified Simulation of Glucose Hydrolysis to Levulinic Acid for Estimating Kinetic Parameters

Levulinic acid (LA) is a short-chain fatty acid with ketone and carboxylic acid group which gives it superior characteristics as a building-block chemical for producing various chemicals, such as: Ƴ-valerolactone (GVL), methyltetrahydrofuran (MTHF), diphenolic acid (DPA), delta-aminolevulinic acid (DALA), and levulinate ester. Levulinic acid can be synthesized from various kinds of biomass and its derivatives, one of which is glucose. The reaction route of glucose hydrolysis to LA generally involves intermediates such as fructose, levoglucosan, and HMF, depending on the type of catalyst used. In this study, simulation of the kinetics of the hydrolysis reaction of glucose into LA was performed by simplifying the reaction scheme from reference data. The variables studied were temperature (140-160oC) and concentration of hydrochloric acid catalyst (0.5-1.5 M). The hydrolysis data were simulated with three different models using MATLAB 2018a. The function of ode45 was used to solve the differential equations and fminsearch tool was used to minimize the kinetic parameter values. Chang's model produces a greatest mean R2 (closer to one), which is considered more suitable than Mikola and Liang's model. © 2024 American Institute of Physics Inc.. All rights reserved.