Cracking of Sugars for Production of Chemicals

Biomass represents the most readily available source of renewable carbon and is a promising feedstock for sustainable production of chemicals and fuels. While other renewable resources such as solar, water and wind can be used to produce heat and power, biomass can potentially be used for production of chemicals as well as renewable liquid, solid and gaseous fuels. It has previously been shown that fast pyrolysis can be used to convert glucose to glycolaldehyde in high yields (>50 wt%) along with other chemicals by spraying an aqueous solution of glucose into a fluidized bed operated at 500 – 600 °C [1]. This method of sugar conversion is called “sugar cracking”. The product distribution for the sugar cracking process utilizing an aqueous glucose feed is considerably different from fast pyrolysis of crystalline glucose in micropyrolyzers, which only yields 6-7 wt% glycolaldehyde [2,3]. Glycolaldehyde can be hydrogenated in a second step to produce monoethylene glycol (MEG) [4], which is a large commodity chemical with an annual production capacity of 34.8 million tons (2016). MEG is primarily used in the synthesis of polyester fibres and PET bottles (> 80%), while other uses include antifreeze [5]. In this work, a kinetic model for sugar cracking is presented along with experiments investigating the effects of operating conditions with the aim to validate the kinetic model