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Project

Valorization of date fruit pomace to lactic acid and adsorbent material

Date fruit processing is a major food industry in United Arab Emirates with dates syrup as one of their key products. The solid residue from this industry, the date fruit pomace (DFP), is sold as an under-valued ingredient mainly to the animal feed industry. DFP, still rich in sugars, can be regarded as a potential renewable resource to be used as a substrate for fermentation by microorganisms. The aim of this project is to valorize the DFP to produce lactic acid and an adsorbent material to remove sulfate from brine. Lactic acid is widely used in the food related applications but recently it has gained many other industrial applications like biodegradable plastic production. Lactic acid is the monomer of polylactic acid, which is the world’s most used biodegradable polymer. Utilizing food crops for non-food production has led to food versus energy nexus and hence current focus is on using second generation biomass such as fruit wastes to produce lactic acid. In UAE, the major challenge for the desalination plants is the proper brine management. The high sulfate content in brine has led to serious environmental issues. The current methods for sulfate removal such as chemical treatment, membrane separation, adsorption and biological treatment suffer from limited removal efficiency and high cost. Recently, lignocellulosic agricultural residues such as banana stem, wheat straw, sugarcane bagasse used as raw material to prepare anion exchangers have been reported. DFP would be a potential substrate to obtain novel and low-cost adsorbent. The proposed novel process involves utilizing the DFP to produce lactic acid via fermentation using the bacteria, Lactobacillus casei. The solid residue remaining after fermentation will be utilized to produce the adsorbent material for sulphate removal by converting it to an activated carbon or chemically modifying it to anion adsorbent with epichlorohydrin and trimethylamine to introduce epoxy and amino groups.

Date:25 Mar 2021 →  Today
Keywords:Date fruit pomace, Lactic acid, Adsorbent material
Disciplines:(Waste)water treatment processes, General chemical and biochemical engineering not elsewhere classified, Fermentation
Project type:PhD project