Selective recovery of formic and acetic acids from their aqueous solutions by reactive extraction using non-polar solvents

摘要

Following to the pretreatment of biomass, acetic and formic acids appear in the aqueous media. These carboxylic acids also co-exist at several biochemical productions. Both have broad applications and significant roles in various industries. Thus, their selective recovery from aqueous media would be useful and may reduce the need for their re-manufacture and the cost in industry. However, recovery of carboxylic acids from their dilute solutions keeps its challenge and high cost of separation processes should be decreased. Reactive extraction is one of the most efficient methods for the recovery of value-added products and its relatively low cost could be further reduced without decreasing the extraction efficiency by the appropriate selection of the organic phase constituents (solvents and extractants-concentrations) and their use at the optimized conditions (aqueous pH and compositions).