Physicochemical Characterizations of Distillate Fractions of Biocrude Oil Converted from Wet Biowaste Via Hydrothermal Liquefaction

Zhenwei Wu^a, Wan-Ting Chen^a, Yuanhui Zhang^a*, Lance Schideman^b, B.K. Sharma^b

^a Department of Agricultural & Biological Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, 61801

^b Illinois Sustainability Technology Center, Champaign, Illinois, 61820

The goal of this study is to understand the physicochemical properties of distillate fractions of biocrude oil converted from wet biowaste, such as swine manure and food processing waste, via hydrothermal liquefaction (HTL). HTL is a technology used to reduce complex organic materials into a biocrude oil fraction, an aqueous fraction, a gaseous fraction, and a solid residue fraction. Our previous study showed that biocrude oil converted from wet biowaste via HTL contains comparable and higher heating values (HHV) to transportation fuels such as gasoline. However, the application of HTL biocrude oil still remains unknown because up-scaled production and proper separation of HTL biocrude oil are still underdeveloped. As a consequence, this study aims to investigate proper separation methods for HTL biocrude oil. It is hypothesized that distillation can efficiently separate HTL biocrude oil into different fractions because preliminary study shows that the oxygen and nitrogen content in the distillates can be reduced to 2-5% while the heating values can be increased up to 41-47 MJ/kg. Biocrude oil converted from swine manure and food processing waste will be separated by distillation into 8-10 fractions in this study. Detailed physicochemical characterizations, such as GC-MS, FTIR, and TGA analyses, will be conducted with the distillates to investigate their properties for transportation fuel application. Ultimately, it is envisaged that this study can generate knowledge for understanding the fuel properties as well as provide insights for future catalytic hydroprocessing of HTL biocrude oil.