Integrated valorization of lignocellulosic agroindustrial waste to furan based building blocks

This proposal aims to build an integrated platform for the valorization of lignocellulosic agroindustrial waste to furan based building blocks via the discovery of efficient transformation of pentoses (mainly xylose) and hexoses (mainly glucose) to furfural, HMF, and HMF analogs by more efficient and competitive catalyzed technologies. In addition, new advanced furanbased intermediates will be developed, to create more structurally complex target molecules. Our planet’s fossil raw materials are irreversibly diminishing, and the progressive switch of chemical industry to renewable feedstock appears as an unavoidable requirement. Although the chemical community starts being aware of the above problem, production of organic chemicals from renewable feedstock is at the moment far from being technically optimized. Biomass is significantly more multifaceted than fossil raw materials, and constitutes a complex blend of low and high molecular weight products. Furfural (F), readily obtained by cyclodehydration of naturallyoccuring pentosans, appears to be the only unsaturated largevolume organic chemical prepared from biomass. In this line, the furan analog 5 (hydroxymethyl)furfural (HMF) derived from hexoses is considered to be one promising biorenewable building block for the production of polymer monomers and other chemical commodities.