The use of biomass, particularly second generation one, as renewable raw material is crucial to sustain chemical industry. To favor the development of such processes, one needs to make a cost evaluation, which requires knowledge of processes thermodynamics and kinetics. In this paper, different physicochemical property measurements (viscosity, density, refractive index and specific heat capacity) were done for the systems: hydrogenation of levulinic acid or its esters to γ-valerolactone. From these physicochemical measurements, it was possible to extract the ones of the intermediates and perform a thermodynamic model assessment by using Aspen plus. It was found that Hysys Redlich-Kwong-Soave cubic equation of state and Benedict-Webb-Rubin-Starling virial equation state are suitable to describe these chemical systems.
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