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Hydrothermal co-liquefaction of biomass and plastic wastes into biofuel: Study on catalyst property, product distribution and synergistic effects

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posted on 2022-11-17, 17:07 authored by Swathi MukundanSwathi Mukundan, Jonathan WagnerJonathan Wagner, PK Annamalai, DS Ravindran, GK Krishnapillai, J Beltramini

This study reports an efficient conversion route for prosopis juliflora (PJ) biomass into high-quality bio-oil through catalytic hydrothermal liquefaction (HTL) process with systematically substituted hydrogen-rich plastic waste ‘polypropylene (PP)’, and using alumina supported metal oxide (Mo, Ni, W, and Nb) catalysts. The HTL treatments of PJ with PP (0-75 wt.%) were investigated in both sub and supercritical water conditions. An excellent synergy between PP and PJ was observed even in subcritical conditions (97.6% synergy at 340 °C at 25% PP to PJ), while efficient liquefaction of PP alone was observed only in the supercritical conditions. The optimum temperature, and PP substitution were found to be 420 °C and 25% respectively, with 46.5% bio-oil yield, high deoxygenation (65.1%), and carbon recovery (78.9%) when using Nb/Al2O3 as the catalyst. An in-depth analysis of physicochemical properties and the bio-oil product distribution with respect to each catalyst and PP/PJ substitution ratio are discussed in detail. Among all, the Nb/Al2O3 catalyst performed well with remarkable recyclability up to 10 cycles. The produced bio-oil mixture due to its low oxygen content is very promising to be upgraded to precursors for chemicals and transportation biofuels.

History

School

  • Aeronautical, Automotive, Chemical and Materials Engineering

Department

  • Chemical Engineering

Published in

Fuel Processing Technology

Volume

238

Publisher

Elsevier

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Rights holder

© The Authors

Publisher statement

This is an Open Access Article. It is published by Elsevier under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Licence (CC BY-NC-ND). Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Acceptance date

2022-10-01

Publication date

2022-10-11

Copyright date

2022

ISSN

0378-3820

eISSN

1873-7188

Language

  • en

Depositor

Deposit date: 17 November 2022

Article number

107523

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