Furfural purification and production from prospective agricultural waste of oil palm empty fruit bunch: Simulation, design and economic assessments

Furfural is potentially produced from lignocellulose waste of biorefinery processes and is widely used as a value-added in various chemical industries. However, the purification of furfural should be conducted to obtain high purity. This work aims to synthesize, design, and optimize the furfural production using some alternative distillation processes by simulation using Super Pro and ASPEN software. The pretreatment process of producing crude furfural from empty fruit bunch waste is also evaluated. The production cost of $0.23/kg of crude furfural (5 %) was obtained in the preliminary process. In the purification process, the sequenced distillation process was less prospective than the extractive distillation based on the simulation basis and economic evaluation. The extractive distillation using n‑butyl chloride performed better than toluene and benzene as the furfural recovery, and the purity was 98.60 % and 99.94 %, respectively. The payback period (PBP), internal rate return (IRR), and net present value (NPV) also indicated the great performance of the extractive distillation process with values of 1.24 years, 36.04 %, and $14,591,500, respectively. Therefore, the simulation, design, and economic evaluation presented promising results that are feasible for plant establishment.