Current efforts to develop biomass based renewable energy technologies are mainly focused on utilizing biomass to produce platform chemicals. Towards this, a smart integration of chemo and bio catalysis is expected to open up a myriad of novel processes and routes for sustainable production of high value chemicals and fuels. In this regard, our group has pioneered the development of platform chemicals obtained from the fermentation of biomass. In order to achieve commercial scale synthesis of target chemicals, using the integration of fermentation and chemical catalysis, a major challenge is observed in reduced catalyst activity and deactivation in complex reaction environments. Heterogeneous catalyst materials, in the integrated process are required to function at mild temperatures-pressure conditions and in different solvent environments. In our observation, platform chemicals obtained from fermentation routes are showing significant catalyst deactivation due to the presence of biogenic impurities (amino acids and protein residues in ppm amount). In addition, the choice of solvents is showing a pronounced effect on catalyst reactivity

Challenges and opportunities in integrating bio and chemo-catalytic processes to produce value-added chemicals from biomass-derived substrates

ACS Spring 2022

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.