The effect of wood composition and supercritical CO2 extraction on charcoal production in ferroalloy industries

Abstract

This work demonstrates that the integration of supercritical carbon dioxide extraction with slow pyrolysis is an effective method for the production of value-added chemicals and charcoal that is an attractive alternative to coke for industry. Integration of technologies is key for the development of holistic biorefineries that exploit all parts of the biomass feedstock and generate little or ideally no waste. In fact, the use of waste or low valued wood fractions is attractive due to their plentiful abundance and lack of exploitation. Supercritical carbon dioxide has been demonstrated to be effective at the removal of over half of extractives from low quality wood and forestry wastes, which can account for up to 11 wt %, of the dried biomass in waste needles. High extractive yields by supercritical carbon dioxide extraction illustrates the potential of utilizing low quality wood as an alternative feedstock for the sustainable production of value-added chemicals. High yields of steroids and derivatives, terpenes and other plant metabolites were obtained in the extracts of needles, branches and bark. Importantly, supercritical carbon dioxide extraction had little impact neither on the physical properties of original wood nor on the yield of solid charcoal. This indicates that extraction by supercritical carbon dioxide can be used as a method for adding further value to the process by removal of bio-based chemicals, whilst still maintaining the yield of the solid fuel product. Moreover, the heat treatment temperature and supercritical carbon dioxide extraction had a significant impact on the tar yields during pyrolysis, leading to an increase in naphthalene, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, aromatic and phenolic fractions with greater temperature. These results are promising as they show that the charcoal obtained from this renewable feedstock could be used as an alternative to fossil-based coke in applications including ferroalloy industries. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords

biorefinery; pyrolysis; supercritical; sterols; solid fuels

Published in

Energy
2020, Volume: 193, article number: 116696Publisher: PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD

SLU Authors

• Arshadi, Mehrdad

  • Department of Forest Biomaterials and Technology, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
    

Sustainable Development Goals

SDG7 Affordable and clean energy
SDG12 Responsible consumption and production


UKÄ Subject classification

Bioenergy


Publication identifier

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.energy.2019.116696

Permanent link to this page (URI)

https://res.slu.se/id/publ/104926