Engineering Commons^™

Effects Of The Inclusion Of Rice Hull Derived Bio-Oil On Wood Pellet Production, Tyler E. Lowe

Theses and Dissertations

Wood pellet production has become an advancing industry for the sake of reducing greenhouse emissions into the atmosphere especially, in European Union countries. Researchers and industry executives seek new methods and materials to improve the pelletization process. Rice hulls or husks has the potential to aid in wood pelletization as they possess high calorific values. This study focuses on using rice hull derived bio-oil from pyrolysis, which will also decrease ash content, as an additive to aid in the wood pelletization process. Using two groups of rice hull derived bio-oil as an additive in wood pelletization: Group 1 uses heavy …

Anaerobic Co-Digestion Of Aqueous Liquid From Biosolids Pyrolysis, Seyedfatemeh Seyedi

Master's Theses (2009 -)

Pyrolysis is a process to treat biosolids and recover energy. During pyrolysis, conversion of organic matter to energy-rich products yields biochar, py-gas, and pyrolysis liquids (aqueous phase and non-aqueous bio-oil). The aqueous pyrolysis liquid (APL), is a high-COD liquid with no apparent use that contains polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and nitrogen-containing compounds. One potential beneficial use of APL is as a co-digestate to produce more biogas for renewable energy from anaerobic digesters at municipal water resource recovery facilities. Some of the organics in APL may be converted to biomethane via anaerobic digestion under proper conditions. However, some APL organics are known …

Value Added Products From Lignin And Biomass Derivatives, Chen Li

Civil & Environmental Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Pyrolysis is one of the traditional lignin and biomass utilization methods. The liquid products bio-oil and solid products bio-char are the main value-added products from lignin pyrolysis. Due to the narrow application and low quality, using the pyrolysis method to produce bio-oil and bio-char cannot bring sufficient economic benefits. In this dissertation, two methods were investigated to improve the quality of lignin bio-products.

Instead of direct pyrolysis, chemical activation (pyrolysis) was introduced in this dissertation. Compared to bio-char, the lignin chemical activation product lignin-activated-carbon has better economic value. With the best activation conditions, the lignin-activated-carbon produced a surface area of …

Pyrolysis Of Dried Wastewater Biosolids Can Be Energy Positive, Patrick J. Mcnamara, Jon Koch, Zhongzhe Liu, Daniel Zitomer

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

Pyrolysis is a thermal process that converts biosolids into biochar (a soil amendment), py-oil and py-gas, which can be energy sources. The objectives of this research were to determine the product yield of dried biosolids during pyrolysis and the energy requirements of pyrolysis. Bench-scale experiments revealed that temperature increases up to 500 °C substantially decreased the fraction of biochar and increased the fraction of py-oil. Py-gas yield increased above 500 °C. The energy required for pyrolysis was approximately 5-fold less than the energy required to dry biosolids (depending on biosolids moisture content), indicating that, if a utility already uses energy …