Bioenergy

One of the barriers to wider use of many kinds of biomass is the fact that they generate refractory tars and oils when gasified. These compounds cause difficulty when they are passed to downstream components in the system by causing plugging and drop in performance. The compounds can be condensed...

Several degradation products are formed or released during AFEX pretreatment process, which can be divided into five groups: 1) carbohydrates, 2) aliphatic acids, 3) nitrogenous compounds, 4) furans, 5) aromatic compounds. Some of these degradation products are expected to be inhibitory to...

Hybrid poplar biomass feedstocks were impregnated with catalysts and gasified at three different temperatures in a bubbling fluidized bed reactor. The impregnated biomass were gasified in a nitrogen atmosphere at 400 o C, 600 o C, and 800 o C. The gas yield increased with increasing temperature as...

The Rule of thumb for reactor design and process conditions for supercritical water gasification of wet biomass is introduced. The important aspects includes heat transfer and heating rate, reaction rate, plugging, gas composition, inorganic element behavior, and heat of reaction. The know-hows...

Woody biomass is renewable only if sustainable production is imposed. How to evaluate the benefit of different biomass crop species on a sustainability scale is a difficult task. Site dependence and regional diversity are the most important factors, while biomass productivity determines the...

Multi-Scale Study on the Pyrolysis of Sustainable Biomass Feedstock Jessica D. Murillo Department of Chemistry, Environmental Sciences, Tennessee Technological University, Cookeville, TN 38505 Joseph J. Biernacki Department of Chemical Engineering, Tennessee Technological University, Cookeville, TN...

Pyrolysis oils derived from lignocellulosic feedstocks by way of fast pyrolysis offer the possibility of a distinct alternative to the use of petroleum-based fuels. However, an inherent drawback associated with pyrolysis oil its high oxygen content which is due to the nature of the lignocellulosic...

The utilization of switchgrass as a dedicated energy crop is well documented in the scientific community. However, there has not been any large-scale production of switchgrass as a feedstock for the production of biofuels. In this work, three different varieties of switchgrass were grown on 600...

Lignocellulosic biomass has tremendous potential as a feedstock to make renewable fuels and petrochemicals from biomass. The current impediment to the utilization of our biomass resources is that most processes to convert biomass are not currently economical because of long residence times, the...