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theses

The great economic and environmental incentives have motivated the development of biorefinery as an alternative to refinery, since biomass resources can be used to produce both high-volume and low-value fuels and high-value chemicals. Intensive interests have arisen to develop biobased chemicals and ten top added-value platform chemicals are determined including ethanol, furfural, glycerol and derivatives, levulinic acid, hydroxymethylfufural (HMF) etc. [1-3]. This work focuses on the development of efficient and economically sustainable routes for the production of bio-based platform chemicals such as 5-hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF) and furfural and their conversion to p-xylene and phthalic anhydride correspondingly. The acceptance of these products in the market place depends on their competitiveness compared with petroleum-based products in terms of not only economics but also process sustainability. The goal is to study the production of biobased chemicals from the viewpoint of process systems engineering and to develop an integrated framework implementing process design, simulation, heat integration, life cycle assessment (LCA) and process optimization in order to achieve more economically and environmentally friendly production alternative. First, technoeconomic analysis and LCA are used to evaluate the production of p-xylene from starch or glucose via HMF. Then the same approaches are extended to the production of phthalic anhydride from hemicellulose solution via furfural. Finally, the framework of process flowsheet optimization is presented using surrogate-based models to represent the detailed models and it is applied in the production of HMF from glucose to optimize operating conditions and compare different alternatives.

ETD_6820

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Zhaojia Lin

doi:10.7282/T3V40X5N

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.