Lactic acid production by catalytic conversion of glucose: An experimental and techno-economic evaluation

Bioproducts are chemicals derived from renewable biological resources and have the potential to replace pet-rochemicals in the future to tackle the arising environmental problems. Among them, lactic acid (LaA) is attracting significant focus from both academia and industry due to its wide application in our daily life. In this study, lactic acid is produced from the chemo-catalytic converting the glucose over the homogeneous ErCl3 catalyst in an aqueous solution. The highest LaA yield of 97% was obtained at a full glucose conversion on this homogeneous catalyst at 260 degrees C through process optimization. Furthermore, the techno-economic analysis (TEA) was leveraged for the concept design of LaA biorefineries. Three parameters, namely the selling price of LaA, the price of glucose, and the catalyst recyclability were identified for the overall profit. Therefore, this work high-lights the notable ability of TEA for the concept design or simulation to screen the promising biorefinery in-dustrial process, and intuitively provide us with the internal rate of return of a certain chemical process. Thus, this work is supposed to provide the feasibility of LaA acid production from a chemo-catalytic process from both the technical and scientific points of view.