Highly Selective Continuous Production of Furfural from Xylose Diboronate Esters: Theoretical Modeling and Experimental Proof

Previous studies identified the use of xylose diboronate esters as an effective way to improve the selectivity of furfural production from xylose. This was experimentally proven in a batch system in the literature; however, due to the second-order nature of the production of side products, a continuously stirred tank reactor (CSTR), where starting material concentrations are low, should yield a higher selectivity. In this paper, we demonstrate that it is indeed the case by first modeling the said reactor and later validating the model by means of an experiment. The model shows that for longer residence times, a higher selectivity is indeed achieved, up to 100% for infinite residence times. In practice, a molar selectivity of 85% to furfural was achieved at 200 °C and a residence time of 30 min, clearly demonstrating the improvement in selectivity over the state-of-the-art.