Desenvolvimento do projeto conceitual de um processo para a produção industrial de poli(ácido lático) a partir do glicerol

Abstract

Due the context related to the sustainable development that society has been receiving in recent years, the search for new alternatives to fossil fuels has been growing a lot of attention, which increases significantly the production of biodiesel, especially in Brazil. In this case, there is huge increase in the production of glycerin as a by-product, which challenges a new arise: find alternatives for the destination of glycerol that make the biodiesel production chain more profitable and capable of absorb the entire production of the by-product. As a result, several processes have been studied and improved for the transformation of this excess glycerol into chemical products of greater added value, including lactic acid. Considering that lactic acid is a material that has received a lot of focus in recent years, due to the possibility of use in the production of PLA biopolymer, this work focuses the analyzes of the possibilities of obtaining polylactic acid from the by-product of the biodiesel process. In face of that, the work focused on establishing a conceptual process for obtaining PLA from lactic acid using technologies already studied and available in published researches. A preliminary Process Flow Diagram (PFD) was developed for the defined process option, which results an approximate mass balance, so it could be used in the project cost estimates. With the estimated costs from the development, it was concluded that the proposed project still does not have feasibility conditions because it is a technology that has not yet matured, which justifies not having industrial employment so far. The cost analyzes carried out, although still in a very early stage of development, showed that the revenues obtained with the conceptual project developed with a production capacity of 1,800 tons of PLA per year, provided a large raw material cost, exceeding 75% of what It was supposed to be. In addition, from the estimated cost of capital, it was found that the net profit necessary to reach a return on investment in an attractive period of time exceeds the revenue generating capacity of the process. However, it is believed that the technologies studied are quite promising and can bring more favorable results when they are at a more advanced level of development.