(635f) Investigating the Performance of the Pyrolysis Process for Different Feedstocks

The significant increase in energy demand, the rapid depletion of conventional energy resources like fossil fuel, and the dangerous environmental effects have boosted the development of renewable and clean energy resources. Biomass conversion is considered one of the promising renewable energy sources in the future since it is abundant and sustainable. Cellulosic (woody) biomass is a renewable feedstock that has the potential to be further converted to energy, high-value chemicals, and biofuels by either gasification or pyrolysis. However, the Biocrude oil produced from biomass has undesired physicochemical properties that prevent it from becoming a useful fuel without further treatments. The main undesired properties are related to the high proportion of reactive oxygenated compounds such as aldehydes, ketones, and acids. One of the promising solutions to mitigate the oxygen level is by using a blend of feedstocks due to the synergy effect.

This research focuses on investigating biocrude oil enhancement technology by utilizing several organic materials as a feedstock for the crude oil production process. The research has four main phases, thermogravimetric and kinetic analysis for individual feedstocks, thermogravimetric and kinetic analysis for a blend and their synergy effect impact, the experimental production of crude oil, and the analysis of the results.

The kinetic analysis of Corn stover, MSW, coal, and oil shale pyrolysis has been investigated after the TGA analysis of that feedstocks was performed. The TGA was done at a certain condition of heating rate, and maximum temperature. This was done as part of quantifying the feedstocks by calculating the water content, volatile content, fixed carbon content, and ash content. Furthermore, the results from the TGA analysis have been used to conduct the kinetic analysis for the feedstock degradation process by using a specified kinetic model. The one-step global model and two-parallel reactions model are considered the most used for organic feedstock pyrolysis prediction. For MSW, coal, and Oil shale, one step global model was used to predict the kinetic parameters for their pyrolysis reaction. The two-parallel reactions model was applied for corn stover pyrolysis due to the different nature of biomass degradation.

The kinetic analysis results showed that the activation energy for Corn stover, MSW, coal, and oil shale are 18179.11 J/mol, 71294.21 J/mol, 30932.2 J/mol, and 90135.4 J/mol with frequency factor values of 208.1723, 266.5895, 3.594037, 361.5594, respectively.