Chapter 6: Separations Technologies for Biobased Product Formation—Opportunities and Challenges

Recent years have witnessed a major thrust moving towards a sustainable, biobased economy using a biorefinery concept. The biorefinery concept is based on obtaining a broad spectrum of biofuels and value-added biobased products from renewable resources—analogous to the petroleum refinery concept. It has two major components—environmentally benign conversion technologies and efficient separations technologies. Separations technologies are important as they contribute to 30–50% of the overall production cost. Due to higher financial incentives, there is a surging interest for commercializing value-added biobased products, which function as precursors or building blocks for industrially relevant downstream chemicals. Particularly, oxygenated biobased species, such as alcohols, organic acids and furans, due to their reactive nature, are of great interest. We embrace this opportunity and designed this chapter focusing on separations technologies that are relevant to biobased product formation. Both fundamental aspects of separations technologies and their state-of-the-art applications for biobased product formation are emphasized. Since this is an emerging area of research and commercialization, none of the technologies are devoid of limitations. Therefore, we discuss the technical challenges and potential solutions associated with the technologies. We believe that this chapter will function as a guideline for identifying suitable separations schemes for biobased product formation.