Production of renewable fuels by blending bio-oil with alcohols and upgrading under supercritical conditions

Sainab Omar, Suzanne Alsamaq, Yang Yang, Jiawei Wang

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

The work studied a non-catalytic upgrading of fast pyrolysis bio-oil by blending under supercritical conditions using methanol, ethanol and isopropanol as solvent and hydrogen donor. Characterisation of the bio-oil and the upgraded bio-oils was carried out including moisture content, elemental content, pH, heating value, gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GCMS), Fourier transform infrared radiation, 13C nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, and thermogravimetric analysis to evaluate the effects of blending and supercritical reactions. The GCMS analysis indicated that the supercritical methanol reaction removed the acids in the bio-oil consequently the pH increased from 2.39 in the crude bio-oil to 4.04 after the supercritical methanol reaction. The ester contents increased by 87.49% after the supercritical methanol reaction indicating ester formation could be the major deacidification mechanism for reducing the acidity of the bio-oil and improving its pH value. Simply blending crude bio-oil with isopropanol was effective in increasing the C and H content, reducing the O content and increasing the heating value to 27.55 from 17.51 MJ·kg −1 in the crude bio-oil. After the supercritical isopropanol reaction, the heating value of the liquid product slightly further increased to 28.85 MJ·kg −1.[Figure not available: see fulltext.].

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)702-717
Number of pages16
JournalFrontiers of Chemical Science and Engineering
Volume13
Issue number4
Early online date23 Oct 2019
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Dec 2019

Bibliographical note

© The Author(s) 2019. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Keywords

  • bio-oil
  • blending
  • characterisation
  • supercritical
  • upgrading

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