Modeling and Analysis of Intensified Processes for Economic Recovery of High-Grade Lactic Acid

The advent of tighter environmental norms to curb pollution and simultaneous increase in crude prices has resulted in the need for production of bulk chemicals from bio-based feedstock. Lactic acid (LA) is a major example of bio-based products and is an important, commodity organic acid used in bio-plastics, pharmaceuticals, food, preservatives, cosmetics, and fertilizers. LA is mainly produced by the microbial fermentation of renewable feedstock. Its separation from dilute fermentation broth and further concentration are energy and cost intensive tasks. Reactive separation involving reactive distillation (RD) and hybrid reactive stripper-membrane (RSM) technology are potential alternatives to recover the desired grades of LA. The present work analyzes the effectiveness of the proposed RSM technology for the hydrolysis of methyl lactate (MLA) to obtain industrial grade LA (88 wt%), and compares its performance with RD. Obtained results are encouraging as MLA conversion increase of 6% and energy savings of nearly 17% can be achieved by RSM compared to RD.