Boreskov Institute of Catalysis of the Siberian Branch of Russian ...

OP-IV-2which is based on renewable sources and gives ecologically friendly and biodegradableproducts.We consider lactic acid as a background chemical for production of a lot of intermediateand final large scale commodity chemicals many of which are ecologically friendly andbiodegradable. The technologies which we are working on at the moment include:− ammonium lactate production from glucose;− ammonium lactate transformation to butyl lactate and ammonia;− production of pure lactic acid and a series of «green solvents» (methyl, ethyl,isopropyl, butyl and other lactic acid esters, which are biodegradable and are able toreplace a series of toxic solvents mentioned in REACH);− production of lactic acid oligomer from lactic acid or butyl lactate, which can betransformed to lactide or to a series of other lactic acid esters;− lactide polymerization with polylactide formation which is biodegradable polymerwith a wide spectrum of application and is able to replace traditional polymers finallytransformed to a huge quantity of wastes;− butyl or methyl lactate or lactic acid hydrogenation with propylene glycol formationwhich will be able to replace toxic and widely used ethylene glycol;− butyl or methyl lactate dehydration with corresponding acrylate formation – anotherlarge scale petrochemical.The key process in this list is a micribiological transformation of glucose to ammoniumlactate which determines the cost and competitive ability of the other chemicals listed belowin comparison with the corresponding petrochemicals. For decreasing of operation cost weused membrane continuous fermenter with thermopilic bacteria. This method makes itpossible to increase productivity of the reactor comparatively with usual periodic installationup to 30 times and to exclude the stage of biomass separation which works continuously inthe membrane reactor as a catalyst. The other transformations listed above are usual chemicaltechnologies which are needed in active, selective, stable and cheep homogeneous orheterogeneous catalyst, optimal reactor design and reaction conditions. We have found suchcatalysts, reaction conditions and designed reactor systems for the majority of the processeslisted above, which will be presented in this report.143