Hydrothermal Process for Bioenergy Production From Corn Fiber and Swine Manure

112 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2009.With the increasing concerns about the net energy balance of corn ethanol, food prices, and efficiency of the corn milling process, other types of liquid fuels such hydrocarbons from thermochemical conversion of biomass have become potentially promising. This study aims at investigating the oil-formation mechanism during hydrothermal conversion of swine manure. For the purpose of mechanism research, a new method was developed first and employed to meet the experimental requirements on materials balance. The swine manure was then converted in a batch reactor at 240-280°C and 10-120 minutes in the absence of a catalyst and the major products were classified into four categories, i.e., oil product, aqueous product, gas product, and solid residue. This study shows that about 33% of toluene soluble oil product can be obtained from swine manure at a temperature as low as 240°C and reaction time as short as 30 minutes. The material balance of experiments implies that the origin of the toluene soluble oil product may be closely related to the non-fiber components in swine manure such as lipid and protein. The separate leaching tests further convince that the toluene soluble oil yield almost proportionally increase with the lipid and protein content in swine manure. The product distributions at different reaction time imply that swine manure experiences a hydrolysis process where a significant fraction of biomass in swine manure decomposes to water-soluble organics, and then derived organics are subsequently gasified to form the gas product under hydrothermal conditions. Within the investigated ranges, the process conditions including reaction temperature, reaction time, initial and system pressure have no significant effect on the oil formation in hydrothermal conversion of swine manure.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD