Development of a process for manufacturing industrially important chemical products from sustainable, bio-based glycerol

The second phase of a research study involving the development of a conceptual process to produce industrially important chemicals from sustainable, biomass derived glycerol is presented. Due to the lack of complete reaction data for glycerol dehydration, a laboratory-scale mini-plant was designed and built to study the reaction. The laboratory mini-plant included a liquid feed system, feed vaporizer, a fixed bed catalytic reactor, and analytical equipment to measure the concentrations of various components in the reactor effluent. The processes developed for the separation and purification of the product were based on economically viable targets. The project holds potential for significant contributions to economic and environmental sustainability by the development of novel production processes which are based on cost effective, renewable raw materials. The proposed conceptual processes would be optimized using process integration tools. This is an abstract of a paper presented at the 2006 AIChE Annual Meeting (San Francisco, CA 11/12-17/2006).