Lactic Acid Extraction and Enzymatic Esterification for the Ethyl Lactate Production from Rice.

Polylactic acid has received much attention because of its biodegradable characteristics. However, to produce the polylactic acid, enormous energy is required at the current purification processes developed up to now. In this work, in order to reduce energy consumption, we proposed a novel purification method which combines lactic acid extraction and enzyme esterification instead of the dehydration and the chemical esterification which are conventionally used. As a result, the new purification method is found to be excellent as the solvents used in this work. It revealed that some solvents (diethyl ether, tert-butyl methyl ether, and methy isobuthyl ketone) have excellent abilities for both lactic acid extraction and enzymatic esterification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]