Energy and exergy analysis of bio-jet fuel production from lignocellulosic biomass via aqueous conversion

Sustainable Aviation Fuel Production through Catalytic Processing of Lignocellulosic Biomass Residues: A Perspective

“…The oxygen removal steps are necessary to control the high reactivity of biomass and allow the production of less reactive intermediates, while C-C coupling reactions are essential to obtain fuels in the appropriate carbon range (higher than 6). These reactions are typically performed in the aqueous phase due to the high solubility in water of the molecules derived from sugar monomers [39]. Furthermore, besides being non-toxic, readily available, affordable and inflammable, water is known to have an amphoteric behaviour and to become more ionized (H 2 O → OH − + H 3 O + ) with the increase of temperature, acting as an acid catalyst in hydrolysis reactions.…”

“…Also, LA is an important biomass-derived compound that can be obtained from the acid hydrolysis of cellulosic wastes [47]. Following this route, the conversion of biomass feedstocks can be accomplished by the combination of multiple reactions that are often accelerated over different catalysts: (i) hydrolysis of polysaccharides to produce glucose (from cellulose) or xylose (from hemicellulose), commonly catalyzed by Brønsted acids; (ii) isomerization of glucose to fructose or xylose to xylulose, which is promoted by Lewis acids or Brønsted bases; (iii) acid-catalyzed dehydration to produce carbonyl-containing furan compounds like HMF (from fructose) and furfural (from xylulose); (iv) aldol/cross-condensation to form larger compounds (>C 6 ) by forming C-C bonds; (v) hydrogenation of these aldol-products to large water-soluble molecules; and vi) dehydration/hydrogenation/HDO reactions to convert these molecules to C 8 -C 16 alkanes over bifunctional acid-metal catalysts [39,48,49]. Figure 1 shows one possible process for SAF production, involving the cascade dehydration, aldol-condensation, hydrogenation and HDO reactions necessary to obtain the fuel with targeted molecular weights [50].…”

A bibliometric analysis on sustainable aviation fuels: core technologies, challenges and trends

“…Essentially, exergy is a property that accounts for entropy and allows for the evaluation of system efficiency [32]. Exergy analysis can be applied both to SAF production [33] and aircraft engine performance [34,35].…”