Continuous hydrothermal liquefaction of Black liquor
Babak Arjmand^1*, Vaibhav Agrawal¹, Jukka Konttinen¹, Tero Joronen¹
¹Bio and Circular Economy Group, Department of Materials Science and Environmental Engineering, Tampere University, Finland
Hydrothermal liquefaction (HTL) is an efficient thermochemical conversion technology to produce high quality bio-crude at Sub and Supercritical water condition. The key benefit of HTL technology is that it can be used with wet feedstock, thus eliminating the use of energy intensive drying step. Black Liquor (BL), a promising by-product from pulp and paper industry will be used in developing HTL technology at Tampere University (TAU) as part of Horizon 2020 Black Liquor to Fuel project (BL2F). BL contains a mixture of lignin, hemicellulose and alkaline salts and is the fifth most promising feedstock for producing biofuel based on IEA report. Development of HTL process using BL has a critical challenge of plugging under continuous operation. Some salts, classified as Type-2 salts forms crystals at the supercritical condition, which grows as the time progresses and ultimately clog the reactor. BL2F aims to design and develop a novel, continuous and integrated HTL process where the salt separation and the HTL reaction can simultaneously takes place in a single reactor. With this integration BL2F aims to bring down the cost of producing bio-crude from HTL process and to make it competitive with the fossil crude. Continuous HTL technology commissioned at TAU is modified for the BL2F project. A number of experiments are planned with BL as a feedstock to study the effect of different operating condition on the HTL product. Factors such as Dry matter content, temperature, and residence time will be studied, and the products, HTL crude, hydrochar and aqueous phase, obtained will be thoroughly analyzed. These analysis results will be presented in this ACS spring 2023 conference.

Tero Joronen

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