Techno‐Economic Analysis for Production of L‐Arabitol from L‐Arabinose

Abstract

The process design for synthesis of arabitol by hydrogenation of arabinose on a supported ruthenium catalyst is described. Aspen HYSYS software was used to design an arabitol production plant for subsequent generation of hydrogen through aqueous phase reforming (APR). The process design included hydrogen recycling requiring a flash drum and recompression. The total costs of arabitol were estimated to be substantially dependent on the feedstock costs and are closely related to arabinose feed cost. Feasible production of hydrogen using APR requires efficient extraction of hemicellulose from lignocellulosic biomass and subsequent hydrolysis.

Selective Oxidation of Arabinose on Gold Catalysts: Process Design and Techno‐economic Assessment

“…The choice of such method is dictated by its applicability across a very broad temperature and pressure range not displaying any anomalous behavior, unlike the activity coefficient property method 38. Moreover, this method has been used in the case studies 27, 35, 39 similar to the current work. The reactor was modeled using the Aspen PFR blocks, in line with Ranade et al 34 who claimed that the plug‐flow model is often applied for modeling of trickle‐bed reactors.…”

“…Process modeling and simulation was done in the Aspen Plus V11 (Aspen Technology) environment previously used in similar cases 2, 20, 27, 35. As arabinoic acid properties involved in modeling were not available in the Aspen Plus database, they were introduced to the simulation by a user‐defined compound wizard option using a properties table as shown in Tab.…”

“…The reactor modeling, however, should take into account internal and external mass transfer limitations, which is reflected by adjusting, e.g., the value of the activation energy compared to the batch reactor. It is worth mentioning that this adjustment of activation energy is not influencing the heat balance as the latter depends on the overall conversion 27.…”

“…The required catalysts amounts have been calculated based on the available experimental data. It is worth mentioning that the values might be somewhat underestimated which can slightly increase the catalyst load and the reactor volume 27.…”

“…In the current work, Aspen Plus was applied for the design of a plant processing 3000 t a −1 of arabinose into arabinoic acid. The results served as a basis for the economic evaluation performed following the guidelines mentioned in the literature for similar cases 24–27.…”