• Energy Research

In this study, levulinic acid (LA) was produced from rice straw biomass in co-solvent biphasic reactor system consisting of hydrochloric acid and dichloromethane organic solvent. The modified protocol achieved a 15% wt LA yield through the synergistic effect of acid and acidic products (auto-catalysis) and the designed system allowed facile recovery of LA to the organic phase. Further purification of the resulting extractant was achieved through traditional column chromatography, which yielded a high purity LA product while recovering ∼85% wt. Upon charcoal treatment of the resultant fraction generated an industrial grade target molecule of ∼99% purity with ∼95% wt recovery. The system allows the solvent to be easily recovered, in excess of 90%, which was shown to be able to be recycled up to 5 runs without significant loss of final product concentrations. Overall, this system points to a method to significantly reduce manufacturing cost during large-scale LA preparation.

Ni/Nb2O5-H, preparedviathe hydrolysis method, possesses a higher number of oxygen vacancies and metal-support interface than Ni on commercial Nb2O5(Ni/Nb2O5-C), resulting in enhanced activity and selectivity towards deoxygenated products.

Extraction of gossypol from cottonseed is essentially required to produce cottonseed free from gossypol for animal feed and or human applications. The focus of the present research was to determine the percentage gossypol extraction after extracting the defatted cottonseed using environment friendly green solvent ethanol-water (95:5 v/v) acidified with 0.5 M oxalic acid. The cottonseed samples were taken according to the fixed solvent to seed ratio and were extracted in batch process using round bottom flasks maintained at required temperatures for different extraction times ranging from 5 to 180 mins. After extraction the samples were filtered and dried and subjected to total gossypol analysis using BIS method. One factor at a time (OFAT) experimental design was employed to optimize the different process parameters like acid type and concentration, solvent to seed ratio, temperature and contact time. The obtained data was studied for analysis of kinetics of extraction using three different kinetic models, calculation of activation energy, evaluating values of kinetic parameters and thermodynamic parameters. The data was also analyzed for evaluation of mass transfer effects viz. liquid film diffusion and internal solid diffusion and calculation of diffusion rate constants for the extraction of gossypol from cottonseed. The present dataset demonstrated the analysis of experimental data for determining the type of kinetics, thermodynamic parameters and mass transfer effects of the solvent extraction for future researchers.