Abstract
Bio-oil can be upgraded through hydrodeoxygenation (HDO). Low-cost and effective catalysts are crucial for the HDO process. In this study, four inexpensive combinations of Ni based activated carbon synergistic catalysts including Ni/AC, Ni-Fe/AC, Ni-Mo/AC and Ni-Cu/AC were evaluated for HDO of prairie cordgrass (PCG) bio-oil. The tests were carried out in the autoclave under mild operating conditions with 500 psig of H2 pressure and 350°C temperature. The catalysts were characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD), Brunauer-Emmett-Teller (BET) and transmission electron microscope (TEM). The results show that all synergistic catalysts had significant improvements on the physicochemical properties (water content, pH, oxygen content, higher heating value and chemical compositions) of the upgraded PCG bio-oil. The higher heating value of the upgraded bio-oil (ranging from 29.65 MJ/kg to 31.61 MJ/kg) improved significantly in comparison with the raw bio-oil (11.33 MJ/kg), while the oxygen content reduced to only 21.70-25.88% from 68.81% of the raw bio-oil. Compared to raw bio-oil (8.78% hydrocarbons and no alkyl-phenols), the Ni/AC catalysts produced the highest content of gasoline range hydrocarbons (C6-C12) at 32.63% in the upgraded bio-oil, while Ni-Mo/AC generated the upgraded bio-oil with the highest content of gasoline blending alkyl-phenols at 38.41%.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 440-448 |
| Number of pages | 9 |
| Journal | New Biotechnology |
| Volume | 33 |
| Issue number | 4 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jun 25 2016 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Funding
The authors thank the financial support from the US DOT-RITA-Earmark through the NC Sun Grant Initiative under the Award SA0700149 . The study was also partially supported by the USDA NIFA (Grant No. 2011-67009-30076 ). The authors would like to thank Dr Douglas Raynie, Mr Eric Boakye and Mr John Kiratu for helping in the GC/MS measurement, Dr Lee Pullan for helping in the TEM analysis. All the supporting experiment from Yinbin Huang and Yong Yu is gratefully acknowledged. However, only the authors are responsible for the opinions expressed in this paper and for any possible error.