(279f) Liquefaction of Corn Cobs with Supercritical Water Treatment

Creating a cleaner environment and a more secure country are dual benefits of developing bio-based products, such as hydrogen fuels, chemicals, and bio-oils. There are a number of techniques that can directly use biomass as feedstock to produce energy and chemicals. These include fermentation of biomass to ethanol and gasification and pyrolysis of biomass to syngas and heavy oil. Federal agencies and private companies have invested heavily in research and development of these techniques. However, these techniques have limited commercial use because of high costs associated with the processes (e.g., fermentation of lignocellulosics) and/or limited knowledge of the processes and their products (gasification and pyrolysis). Tremendous efforts have been made to convert lignocellulosic biomass to fermentable substrates to produce biofuels and chemicals. The objective of our study is to investigate the feasibility of converting lignocellulosic biomass to sugars and burnable oil using supercritical water. The economic feasibility of the proposed technique lies in the development of effective processes and equipment with continuous processing capability. Supercritical water condition is created at high pressure. In our study, a Parr high pressure reactor will be used in this study. Process variables to be studied include pressure, temperature, catalysts, solid load, solid composition, gas composition, and time. The products from the supercritical water assisted reactions are expected to consist of three phases: aqueous phase, oil phase and gaseous phase. The yields and chemical and physical properties of individual phases will be determined.