Engineering Commons^™

Married Coal Gasification And Biomass Pyrolysis, Michael Balch

Honors Theses and Capstones

This project is a proposal to marry a coal gasification process to a biomass pyrolysis. Coal is pyrolized to produce syngas and a large amount of heat. The syngas is treated and fed to a Fischer-Tropsch process. The excess heat produces steam that is used to pyrolize biomass. The biomass produces char, gas, and vapor. The char and gas are recovered, and the vapor is condensed to produce bio-oil.

The proposed plant has a capacity of 1100 tons of biomass (550 dry tons) per day. I assumed an operating factor of 0.9 The plant could be operational within five years, …

Comparison Of Biomass To Bio-Oils Reactor Systems: Direct Conversion Vs. Companion Coal Gasification, Alexandra Eicher

Honors Theses and Capstones

It is well known that the United States’ dependence on crude-oil negatively affects its economy, safety, and environment. To alleviate these negative consequences, a more economical and environmentally-friendly source of fuel, such as biomass, should be explored. The conversion of biomass to bio-oils involves the pyrolysis of biomass at about 500°C, thus requiring a great deal of heat. This heat source could be the excess waste heat from a coal gasifier.

As such, this report specifies the design of an industrial plant that produces bio-oils from biomass by using the waste heat from a coal gasifier. It is designed to …

Octanol/Water Partitioning Coefficients Of Pcb Mixtures For Environmental Fate And Transport, Phylicia Cicilio

Honors Theses and Capstones

Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) are a human and environmental toxin introduced to the environment from the 1920’s to the 1970’s from manufacturing items such as transformers and capacitors. PCBs remain in the environment today due to their low water solubility and resistance to chemical reaction. Due to their properties PCBs bioaccumulate in the environment and pose health risks to animals and humans, as they are deemed a probable carcinogen by the EPA. Octanol-water partitioning coefficients are a means of measuring how PCBs will travel in the environment, either partitioning to water or into organic carbon. Octanol-water partitioning coefficients will be determined …

Kinetics Of Lipid Extraction From Microalgae, Brian Mcconnell

Honors Theses and Capstones

No abstract provided.

Lipid Production By Scenedesmus Dimorphus: Comparison Of Extraction Techniques And Effect Of Sodium Nitrate Concentration, Bahareh Kanani

ETD Archive

No abstract provided.

Moving Horizon Estimation With Dynamic Programming, Mohan Kumar Ramalingam

ETD Archive

Moving Horizon Estimation(MHE) is a optimization based strategy to state estimation. It involves computation of arrival cost, a penalty term, based on the MHE cost function. Minimization of this arrival cost is done through various methods. All these methods use nonlinear programming optimization technique which gives the estimate. The main idea of MHE revolves around minimizing the estimation cost function. The cost function is dependent on prediction error computation from data and arrival cost summarization. The major issue that hampers the MHE is choosing the arrival cost for ensuring stability of the overall estimation and computational time. In order to …