Catalytic gasification of wet biomass in supercritical water
- Univ. of Hawaii, Honolulu, HI (United States); and others
Wet biomass (water hyacinth, banana trees, cattails, green algae, kelp, etc.) grows rapidly and abundantly around the world. As a biomass crop, aquatic species are particularly attractive because their cultivation does not compete with land-based agricultural activities designed to produce food for consumption or export. However, wet biomass is not regarded as a promising feed for conventional thermochemical conversion processes because the cost associated with drying it is too high. This research seeks to address this problem by employing water as the gasification medium. Prior work has shown that low concentrations of glucose (a model compound for whole biomass) can be completely gasified in supercritical water at 600{degrees}C and 34.5 Wa after a 30 s reaction time. Higher concentrations of glucose (up to 22% by weight in water) resulted in incomplete conversion under these conditions. The gas contained hydrogen, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, methane, ethane, propane, and traces of other hydrocarbons. The carbon monoxide and hydrocarbons are easily converted to hydrogen by commercial technology available in most refineries. This prior work utilized capillary tube reactors with no catalyst. A larger reactor system was fabricated and the heterogeneous catalytic gasification of glucose and wet biomass slurry of higher concentration was studied to attain higher conversions.
- OSTI ID:
- 420484
- Report Number(s):
- CONF-950402-; ISSN 0569-3772; TRN: 97:000006-0020
- Journal Information:
- Preprints of Papers, American Chemical Society, Division of Fuel Chemistry, Vol. 40, Issue 2; Conference: 209. American Chemical Society (ACS) national meeting, Anaheim, CA (United States), 2-6 Apr 1995; Other Information: PBD: 1995
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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