Production of Levulinic Acid from Chitosan by Acidic-Hydrothermal Reaction

− Recently, many chemicals produced from renewable resources such as lignocellulosics, micro-algae and marine macro-algae, were introduced to chemical industry. Chitin/chitosan is secondly abundant feedstock on Earth. It is easily obtained from crusraceans’ shells such as crab, shrimp and insects. In this work, we performed the acidic-hydrothermal hydrolysis to produce levulinic acid from chitosan using statistical approach. By design of response surface methodology, the effect of reaction temperature, catalyst amount, and reaction time and their reciprocal interactions were investigated. As a result, higher reaction temperature and catalyst amount increased the higher concentration of levulinic acid. However, reaction time did not caused large increase of levulinic acid after some reaction period. Levulinic acid of 2.7 g/L produced from chitosan in the optimized condition of reaction temperature of 175 oC, sulfuric acid of 2.4% and reaction time of 40.7 min.