Periodic Reporting for period 2 - REBOOT (Resource efficient bio-chemical production and waste treatment)
Período documentado: 2021-07-01 hasta 2022-12-31
Work has also been carried out finding catalysts suitable for HTL. Catalyst ssupports TiO2, ZrO2 and TiO2+ZrO2, were doped with promising transition metals, Ni, Co and Fe and subsequently screened for activity and stability. All supports were shown to be stable under hydrothermal conditions and increased bio-crude yields could be obtained. In parallel catalytic upgrading of bio-crude has been carried out for manure biocrudes in a fixed bed hydrogenation reactor to produce diesel and kerosene.
The process water challenge in HTL has been addressed by two technologies: wet-oxidation and electrocatalytic oxidation. The former converts soluble organics to heat and CO2, which can be integrated in the main HTL process to provide the heat demand for the HTL reactor while cleaning the water. Electro-oxidation has shown to be effective in converting the organics to hydrogen using electricity which could be used to upgrade the bio-crude by hydrogenation. Both technologies have been experimentally validated in continuous flow and published in peer review literature.
In terms of phosphorous recovery and inorganic separation a new continuous flow reactor has been built where the P recovery can be optimized using different process conditions and separation devices. Early results have already shown that there are significant differences in the recovery of inorganics hen comparing state of the art continuous reactors to batch reactors. It is envisioned that with this newly built reactor the most optimal separation condition and devices can be identified and optimized to allow their installation, testing and validation in a continuous pilot scale reactor. This would set the state of the art in terms of reactor design for future HTL commercial plants.