Conversion of waste bamboo chopsticks to liquid fuel via hydrothermal treatment and solvent-assisted liquefaction with ethanol and isopropanol

Along with ther rapid development, the demand of fossil fuels such as oil is increases greatly, resulting in a gradual shortage of fossil fuel reserves.Therefore, the exploitation of renewable energies such as bio-energies becomes increasingly important and this issue is indispensable. Among them, biomass has attracted wide attention because of its high availability. Moreover, if the resource comes from waste, then its potential for producing the bio-energy would increase but also the reuse of yield of waste biomass not only reduces the need of raw biomass and serves a way to the bio-fuel. Further, the biomass is mainly made of cellulose and lignin. It can used to produce bio-ethanol via fermentation. Recently, a newly developed thermal-chemical technology of hydrothermal-liquefaction (HTL). It turns the bio-waste into liquid fuel.The most interesting advantage is that the bio-waste doesn’t need to remove the water. It can be directly charged into the reactor to proceed the reaction. It’s very suitable treating for the biomass and algae applies containing water. This research applies to convert waste bamboo chopsticks (WBC) into liquid fuel. Factors examined included temperature (310 and 340 ℃), solvent volume (0, 25, 50, 75, 85, 100% v/v) and catalyst type (homogenous and heterogenous). Properties of products of solid, liquid, gas, and bio-crude oil were analyzed. The results show that the conditions at 340 ℃ with 75 vol.% of isopropanol and 5 wt.% of potassium carbonate have the highest solid conversion (88.09%) and bio-crude oil yield (57.01%). Overall, the enhancing effect of using isopropanol is better than using ethanol. Additional addition of heterogenous catalyst and hydrogen does not offer clear enhancement. Thus, rather than adding hydrogen to the HTL system, a post hydrogenation of the bio-crude oil product of HTL to upgrade its quality may be more feasible. The simulated distillation of bio-crude oil was conducted and compare with those of serveral fuels. The carbon number of bio-crude oil is closed to that JetA-1 aviation fuel , while other properties are not. Further upgrading of bio-crude oil by proper methods, such as hydrogenation and simulated distillation, would be needed to its property of closed to that of JetA-1.The color, viscosity, property of bio-crude oil are closed to those of heavy oil and boat oil.