14^th International Conference on Biofuels and Bioenergy December 09-10, 2021 Paris, France

Prof. Czekaj has completed her habilitation in 2015 at Cracow University of Technology and Ph.D. in 2004 from the Institute of Catalysis Polish Academy of Sciences, she worked as a scientist at Paul Scherrer Institute and Institute for Chemical and Bioengineering, ETH, Zürich in Switzerland. She is now the leader of the Catalytic and Nanostructured Materials Design group at the Cracow University of Technology in Poland. She has published more than 45 papers in reputed journals and has been serving as an editorial board member of repute.

The development of building block, intermediate, and end-use molecules derived from lignocellulosic biomass to promote a full valorization of Agroindustrial residues is an essential issue nowadays. The target molecule in our studies is levulinic acid, which is a platform molecule that is used as a precursor for pharmaceuticals, plasticizers, and various other additives. It arises as a result of depolymerization and dehydration of the cellulose fraction. The development of chemo catalytic methods for the conversion of fractions obtained from the hydrolysis of cellulose included an initial screening in the liquid phase using heterogeneous catalysts under controlled conditions of temperature and pressure. Single C6 and C5 sugars have been selected as starting materials and at a later stage, the study will be extended to include actual fractions isolated from sugar industry waste products and lignocellulosic biomass conversion. The performed experiments enabled to divide all tested sugars into two different groups: 1) D-glucose, D-fructose, D-mannose, and D-galactose) - is characterized by relatively good reactivity, accompanied by a quite good selectivity to levulinic acid, 2) L-xylose, L-arabinose, L-fucose, L-ramnose, sodium gluconate, sodium glucuronate - showed completely different behavior at high temperature under acidic conditions. Many solid catalysts with the most reactive fructose were tested in this process. The most reasonable results were obtained almost exclusively with acidic resins. Acknowledgment: Project sponsored in Poland by National Centre for Research and Development (NCBiR) within international program ERANet-LAC 3rd Multi-Thematic Joint Call 2017/2018: ERANet-LAC/3/GreenMol/3/2019 “Development of Green Molecules from Lignocellulosic Biomass for Renewable Chemistry”