Impact of biomass feedstock variability on acid-catalyzed alcoholysis performance

Alcoholysis was an efficient way for liquefying lignocellulosic biomass into valuable platform chemicals. In this study, the impact of feedstock types on the acid-catalyzed alcoholysis performance was systematically investigated by comparing the alcoholysis ratio, product distribution and production of main products. Component analysis showed that three major chemical components could be efficiently degraded, further, hemicellulose and lignin were prone to be decomposed than cellulose. The time dependent alcoholysis ratio evolution was highly related to the feedstock types with the variation in lignin content and cellulose crystallinity index (CrI). The alcoholysis product distributions also varied significantly with different feedstocks according to the GC-MS analysis results. Ethyl levulinate (EL), furfural and ethyl p-hydroxybenzoate were identified as the major components in the products. The high mass yield 12.4% of EL was obtained from corn stover, and it was highly correlated to the cellulose content and CrI. The maximum mass yield of furfural was produced from wheat straw while a considerable amount of ethyl p-hydroxybenzoate was typically produced from poplar wood. With the comprehensive understanding of the impact of feedstock variability on the alcoholysis performance, our study could give an empirical evidence for product-oriented feedstock selection in biofuels and chemicals production.