Engineering Commons^™

Kinetics Of Furfural Production By Dehydration Of Xylose In A Biphasic Reactor With Microwave Heating, George W. Huber, R. Weingarten, J. Cho, W. C. Conner Jr.

George W. Huber

In this paper we report a kinetic model for the dehydration of xylose to furfural in a biphasic batch reactor with microwave heating. There are four key steps in our kinetic model: (1) xylose dehydration to form furfural; (2) furfural reaction to form degradation products; (3) furfural reaction with xylose to form degradation products, and (4) mass transfer of furfural from the aqueous phase into the organic phase (methyl isobutyl ketone - MIBK). This kinetic model was used to fit experimental data collected in this study. The apparent activation energy for xylose dehydration is higher than the apparent activation energy …