Solvent effect on the kinetics of the hydrogenation of n-butyl levulinate to γ-valerolactone

The use of lignocellulosic biomass in the chemical industry can significantly contribute to respect the various international agreements on climate change. One of the most promising platform molecules issued from the lignocellulosic biomass hydrolysis is γ-valerolactone (GVL). GVL can be upgraded to valuable chemicals and produced by the hydrogenation of alkyl levulinates. Although these reactions are widely studied, seldom research focused on the solvent effect. To fill this gap, the effect of three different reaction mixtures with an excess of butyl levulinate (BL), of butanol and GVL was studied on the kinetics of BL hydrogenation to GVL over Ru/C. PC-SAFT (Perturbed-Chain Statistical Associating Fluid Theory) shows that the solubility of hydrogen is not constant during the reaction progress, and it was taken into account. To allow a fair comparison, kinetic models were developed using Bayesian statistics for each reaction mixture. The best performances were obtained when the reaction mixture has an excess of GVL.