| In the past few decades, mainly due to the rising prices of oil, researchers have increased the efforts in optimizing the conversion of biomass and biomass derived compounds to fuels and chemicals. The commercialization of biomass conversion to fuels and chemicals has many economic and technical challenges. This work focuses on the catalytic hydrogenation of glycerol and succinic acid in aqueous media using supported metal heterogeneous catalysts. There are numerous studies detailing metal catalyst preparation methods, characterization, and performance for the hydrogenolysis of glycerol and the hydrogenation of succinic acid. Nevertheless, there are very few attempts to model the kinetic behavior of these systems in order to understand their underlying kinetics and mechanism. Therefore, the goal of this work is to investigate the possible pathways and intrinsic kinetics of glycerol and succinic acid hydrogenation towards value-added chemicals. These molecules are two important intermediates that have an important role in the development of sustainable processes for biomass conversion. Developing mathematical models for both glycerol and succinic acid hydrogenolysis is not straightforward since these systems include many multi-step parallel and series reactions. However, these models can help predict reaction conditions that can improve the selectivity towards desired products as well as the proper reactor choice when scaling up the process towards commercial scale. |
