(612a) Determination Methods for Caloric Properties of Lignocellulosic Biomass

To avoid the development and implementation of ineffective utilisation routes for biomass, a systematic process development is crucial. Otherwise, there is a great danger to realize processes that later turn out to have a weak or even negative net energy balance.

A systematic development of new processes requires reliable data concerning the formation properties of the respective biomass. Knowledge of, e.g. the enthalpy of formation, is of vital importance for determining the amount of energy necessary to produce a specific biofuel. Furthermore, these data are essential for the prediction of the reaction equilibrium, which is necessary on account of thermodynamic limitations that may result in decrease in energy efficiency. For some smaller biomass compounds (e.g. certain mono- and disaccharides), experimental data can be found in the literature, but they are virtually not available for most of  the higher saccharides like cellulose or complex structures like lignin.

The aim of this project is to examine different methods for the determination of formation properties of long chain and branched polymeric biomass. A possibility for predicting these data are different first- and second-order group contribution methods. Since these models are often not capable to predict all needed properties, yield insufficient accuracy or simply lack in essential parameters, different combinations of technics have been studied and validated.

Short-cut methods for the determination of the enthalpy of formation based on structural information have been developed and tested for their applicability to predict the properties of biomass compounds.

This project has been supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Project #: AR 236/34-1).