Production of 5-Hydroxymethyl Furfural from Hexose Sugars Using Acid Catalysts

Abstract: Increased population and living standards promotes an unsustainable usage of natural resources. In recent years, increased focus has been put on the bio-refinery industry which shows promising attributes where 5-hydroxymethyl furfural (HMF) is a prominent platform chemical. In this project, production of HMF from fructose using primarily acid silica under benign reaction conditions was investigates including the effect of temperature, substrate and catalyst in addition to extraction of silica from rice husk for use as catalyst. Optimization regarding monophasic production has been performed, resulting in a conversion yield of 0.95 mol HMF/mol fructose in DMSO with 5.0 g/L silica activated with sulfuric acid. Low productivity and efficiency was a consistent trend in respect to biphasic production. However, the benefits associated indicate that there is further room for optimization in implementation of industrially scaled production. An integrated process including enzymatic substrate isomerization, production and purification adapting a biphasic system was thus proposed. Different solvents have been examined where the highest productivity of 11 (g/(L·h)) and corresponding yield of 18 mol% at 120°C after 120 min, was achieved in a methyl isobutyl ketone (MIBK)/water/salt – system.