Preliminary investigation on concentrating of acetol from wood vinegar

Acetol, as one of the components in biomass pyrolysis liquid, is a high value added compound for medicine synthesis. Benefit may be obtained if acetol can be extracted from the pyrolysis liquid, while the instability of acetol makes the concentrating difficult. In this paper, the concentrating of acetol from wood vinegar is preliminarily investigated, and the conditions of distillation, solvent extraction, and Na2CO3 effect on the concentrating result are discussed. Herein the content of acetol can be concentrated from below 4% in the raw wood vinegar to above 60%, and the number of main components reduce from over 20 to 5, while the yield of acetol is still rather low. It was found that in the organic solution distillation process, acetol can be easily concentrated from 1% to above 40%, while a further distillation of the concentrated acetol system was rather hard. The conversion of acetol in the distillation process was probably an important cause to the low yield of acetol, and a lower distillation temperature was advantageous for the concentrating of acetol.