Academic Awards 2024 booklet

21 Intensification of cyclopentanone production from biomass derived furfural as precursor for renewable jet fuels EU mandate requires an increasing portion of fuel used at EU airports to consist of sustainable aviation fuels (SAFs), starting from 2% by 2025 to 70% by 2050. Production is set to reach targets up to 2030, but needs significant scale-up to reach further targets. So how do we get there? A candidate SAF feedstock is lignocellulosic biomass. It consists of abundant and non-food byproducts from industry, like corn stalks and leaves or paper and wood residues. Producing SAFs from lignocellulosic biomass takes several reactions. In my thesis, I investigated the conversion of furfural (FF) to cyclopentanone (CPN). This reaction had only been researched in batch reactors with large residence times, while continuous flow reactors are needed to scale- up production. We optimized the reaction in a continuous reactor over temperature, pressure, residence time and catalyst. However, even at optimal conditions we initially could not get a yield above 50% due to side product formation, giving a severe carbon loss. We identified one reaction step to cause most of the carbon loss. We proposed, based on a proof-of-concept, a staged reactor to individually tune conditions at each step. This paves way for optimizing the efficient use of feedstock at industrial scale!