Ifeoma Nwabekee^1,, Sunday Eze¹, Precious Emole¹, Christopher Elekwachi², Rutherford Ikenna Esiaba²

Agricultural wastes rich in bioactive compounds consequently should be considered as raw materials rather than wastes. The use of agricultural wastes as raw materials can help to reduce production cost and contribute to the recycling of waste. Using the acid hydrolysis gravimetric method, furfural was produced and quantified from waste materials; corn cob, sawdust, and rice husk. The obtained results showed varied physicochemical properties of the waste materials, with the cellulose contents varying from 22.8% for sawdust, 38.7% for corn cob, and 30.1% for rice husk. The ash content was 6.9%, 8.5%, and 11.5% for sawdust, corn cob and rice husk respectively. Lignin varied from 16.0% for sawdust, 16.6% for corn cob and 21.8% for rice husk. Bulk density varied from 0.21 g/cm³, 0.27 g/cm³ and 0.29 g/cm³ while the porosity varied from 73.9%, 73.0%, and 67.8% for sawdust, corn cob and rice husk respectively. There were variations in the furfural yield of the different agro-wastes with corn cob having the highest yield 26.1 g amounting to 68.1% of furfural), followed by rice husk (21.6 g; 62.6% of furfural) and then sawdust (19.5 g; 59.5% of furfural). The mineral acids (H₂SO₄<HCl<H₂PO₄) have higher yield compared to the acetic acid (CH₃COOH). There were variations in the quality characteristics of the furfural produced from different waste materials with the same specific gravity of 1.17 g/cm³, solubility of 8.6%, 8.5% and 8.4%. The kinetics of furfural production indicated that the kinetics data were best fitted by the pseudo-first-order model and this suggests that during the course of the reaction, the concentration of water is nearly constant and therefore the reaction appears to be a first order.

agricultural wastes, distillation, furfural, kinetics