The research group of Yuya Tachibana at Gunma University has developed a procedure for the production of terephthalic acid (TPA), the monomer of the widely used thermoplastic polymer polyethylene terephthalate (PET), from the inedible biomass-derived starting material furfural. Alternative, commercially available bio-based PET is made from bio-based ethylene glycol (derived from bioethanol) and petroleum-based TPA, which is made from p-xylene, so the amount of biomass carbon content in the PET is only 20 wt.%. This new route to TPA offers the possibility for 100% bio-based carbon in PET.<\/p>\n
The production process consists of six steps: (1) oxidation of furfural to fumaric and maleic acids; (2) dehydration of the acids to maleic anhydride; (3) Diels-Alder (DA) reaction of anhydrous maleic acid and furan to the exo-DA adduct; (4) dehydration of the exo-DA adduct to phthalic anhydride; (5) hydrolysis of phthalic anhydride to dipotassium phthalate; and (6) transfer reaction and acidification of dipotassium phthalate to TPA. In laboratory trials, TPA was produced with 19% yield and 95\u201398% purity.<\/p>\n
Tachibana says the group aims to improve the production process by reducing the number of steps to two, increasing the yield to 35\u201340% or even higher (50%). He says the use of bio-based TPA for plastics has the potential to fix approximately 970,000 ton\/yr of CO2 in Japan.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The research group of Yuya Tachibana at Gunma University has developed a procedure for the production of terephthalic acid (TPA), the monomer of the widely used thermoplastic polymer polyethylene terephthalate (PET), from the inedible biomass-derived starting material furfural. Alternative, commercially available bio-based PET is made from bio-based ethylene glycol (derived from bioethanol) and petroleum-based TPA, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":59,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","nova_meta_subtitle":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5572],"tags":[],"supplier":[9655],"class_list":["post-25439","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bio-based","supplier-gunma-university"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25439","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/59"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25439"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25439\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25439"},{"taxonomy":"supplier","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/supplier?post=25439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}