Towards Sustainable Lactic Acid Production: Avoiding Gypsum as a Byproduct by using Selective Liquid‐Phase Adsorption

Abstract

The utilization of biomass is one of the major challenges for the transition from fossil to renewable resources. Often, the separation of the desired product from the reaction mixture is the most energy‐intensive step. Liquid‐phase adsorption is a promising separation technology that could significantly improve downstream processing in biorefineries. Highly hydrophobic adsorbents were applied for the separation of lactic acid (LA) from aqueous solutions and to avoid the formation of gypsum as a byproduct. High uptakes and selectivity were obtained in single‐solute and co‐adsorption experiments. Porous hyper‐crosslinked polymers (HCP) and polymer‐based spherical activated carbon performed best and showed excellent selectivity for the selective removal of LA. Desorption experiments revealed that HCP was the ideal adsorbent for the separation of LA from aqueous solution and enabled the production of gypsum‐free LA.

3D‐Structured Monoliths of Nanoporous Polymers by Additive Manufacturing

“…Based on MOFs and COFs in recent years porous organic polymers gained increased attention due to their intriguing properties for adsorption of organic compounds as well as their preparation routes that can be scaled up easily [31][32][33]. In our group, hyper-crosslinked polymers (HCP) are investigated for various applications such as liquidphase adsorption [34,35] and membrane nanofiltration [36]. Also, the synthesis routes have been improved in the past [37,38].…”

Separation of Biobased Carboxylic Acids by Aqueous Phase Nanofiltration

“…Unfortunately, a lot of salt waste as by-product is produced within this recovery approach. To overcome this, we could already show that adsorption on porous organic polymers is another suitable procedure to extract carboxylic acids from their reaction mixture [10].…”