EUBCE 2024 - Sara FULIGNATI - Exploitation of the Marine Waste Posidonia Oceanica Egagropiles to Biofuel

Exploitation of the Marine Waste Posidonia Oceanica Egagropiles to Biofuel

Short Introductive summary

Egagropiles are fibrous spherical aggregates of Posidonia Oceanica wastes, which accumulate along the coast causing environmental problem. Nowadays, the egagropiles are mainly buried or disposed in landfills but these strategies do not allow the real exploitation of this lignocellulosic biomass. This work proposes the egagropiles of Posidonia oceanica as feedstock to produce butyl levulinate (BL) can be considered one of the most important alkyl levulinate because it has low water solubility, resulting much more environmentally friendly, and high energy density and allows the reduction of polluting emissions. The amount of cellulose in the egagropiles confirmed their potential as feedstock to produce BL that has been perforformed under microwave heating. The influence of temperature, time, catalyst amount (H2SO4) and biomass loading were studied with the aim of maximizing the BL yield and concentration. Once optimised the reaction conditions under microwave heating, the butanolysis was also studied under conventional on to prove the feasible scale-up of the process. Together with BL, a solid residue called char was also produced and characterized to propose its possible employment.

S. Fulignati, University of Pisa, ITALY
L. Bonaldi, University of Pisa, ITALY
F. Barsotti, University of Pisa, ITALY
D. Licursi, University of Pisa, ITALY
N. Di Fidio, University of Pisa, ITALY
V. Menicagli, University of Pisa, ITALY
E Balestri, University of Pisa, ITALY
C. Antonetti, University of Pisa, ITALY
A.M. Raspolli Galletti, University of Pisa, ITALY