In order to establish suitable conditions for the production of feedstocks
or liquid fuels from a renewable source, a liquefaction process of lignin o
btained from sugar cane bagasse was investigated. Monoethanolamine was used
as liquefaction solvent and hydrogen as pressurization gas.
Liquefaction process was optimized using a modified simplex method consisti
ng of three variables: temperature, time, and solute:solvent ratio. The goa
l of the proposed method was to maximize the yield in light oils that was a
chieved with a total of only 27 experiments and with a yield 5 times higher
than the initial one, obtained before the optimization procedure.