Residual Lignocellulosic Biomass in the Production of HMF

5-Hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF) can be obtained from the dehydration of monosaccharides present in biomass, which helps add value to the raw material. The present work sought to study the relationship between the parameters of biomass characterization, including the content of reducing sugars, total soluble solids and the mid-infrared (MIR) and near-infrared (NIR) spectra, and the formation of HMF after synthesis. A thorough analysis was conducted in order to evaluate the residual agricultural biomass samples from sugarcane bagasse, corn stover, cassava branch, banana pseudostem and mango fruits after the drying (45 °C maximum) and ball mill grinding pre-processing procedure. HMF synthesis was performed using 0.50 mol L^-1 HCl and n-butanol as extracting solvent. The analytical quantification of HMF and furfural (co-product of synthesis) was performed using high-performance liquid chromatography coupled to diode-array detector (HPLC-DAD). The highest efficiency of the synthesis of HMF was observed for the mango fruits (55.0 kg ton^-1) and sugarcane bagasse biomass (47.5 kg ton^-1) samples. The application of data fusion and principal component analysis (PCA) allowed us to identify the samples with greater potential for HMF synthesis.

Keywords:
biomass conversion; agricultural residues; validation; smoothing; FTIR-ATR; data fusion