Development of an Industry-Applicable Distillation Process to Prepare High-Purity Furfural

Furfural can be produced by the acidification and hydrolysis of biomass raw materials, which have the advantages of low prices, abundant sources, and short renewable cycles. High-purity furfural is valuable, but currently, the processes in industry can only obtain furfural with a purity as low as 98.5%. Therefore, people urgently need an industry-applicable purification process to produce high-purity furfural. In this study, a new distillation process was proposed to produce a high-purity furfural. To our knowledge, we are the first to develop such a process. The process has the advantages of large capacity, small device size, high operation stabilities, high operability, and high product purities compared to the single-column batch distillation process. Pilot-scale experiments were performed to verify the modeling results and determine if the process is industry-applicable. The experimental results are in agreement with the modeling ones, and the concentration of furfural in the distillate product is higher than 99.5% and meets the requirements of high-purity furfural.