Top ten fundamental challenges of biomass pyrolysis for biofuels
* Corresponding authors
a Catalysis Center for Energy Innovation and Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Massachusetts Amherst, 686 North Pleasant Street, Amherst, MA, USA
E-mail:dauenhauer@ecs.umass.edu
b Catalysis Center for Energy Innovation and Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, University of Delaware, 150 Academy Street, Newark, DE, USA
Abstract
Pyrolytic biofuels have technical advantages over conventional biological conversion processes since the entire plant can be used as the feedstock (rather than only simple sugars) and the conversion process occurs in only a few seconds (rather than hours or days). Despite decades of study, the fundamental science of biomasspyrolysis is still lacking and detailed models capable of describing the chemistry and transport in real-world reactors is unavailable. Developing these descriptions is a challenge because of the complexity of feedstocks and the multiphase nature of the conversion process. Here, we identify ten fundamental research challenges that, if overcome, would facilitate commercialization of pyrolytic biofuels. In particular, developing fundamental descriptions for condensed-phasepyrolysis chemistry (i.e., elementary reaction mechanisms) are needed since they would allow for accurate process optimization as well as feedstock flexibility, both of which are critical to any modern high-throughput process. Despite the benefits to pyrolysis commercialization, detailed chemical mechanisms are not available today, even for major products such as
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- Article type
- Perspective
- Submitted
- 19 Mar 2012
- Accepted
- 01 May 2012
- First published
- 16 May 2012
Permissions
Top ten fundamental challenges of biomasspyrolysis for biofuels
M. S. Mettler, D. G. Vlachos and P. J. Dauenhauer,Energy Environ. Sci., 2012, 5, 7797DOI: 10.1039/C2EE21679E
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