Abstract
Bio-oil is a reliable renewable alternative to petroleum for wide range of applications such as transportation fuels, power generation and source of many value-added chemicals for petrochemical industry. However, compared to petroleum, the physical and chemical properties of bio-oil such as high oxygen content, high moisture content and low pH are some limiting factors for its real-life applications. Thus, requires upgrading to improve its quality and catalytic hydrodeoxygenation (HDO) is one of the best available bio-oil upgrading techniques. Further, bio-oil is a complex mixture of various organic compounds such as acids, ketones, aldehydes, esters, acids and many phenolic compounds thus difficult to study as a whole mixture. Accordingly, it is often followed by researchers to select a model compound under a given compound catalogue for HDO study; and the same is followed in this work by selecting guaiacol of phenolic catalogue. This HDO study in a fluidized bed reactor has been carried out using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) based solver, ANSYS Fluent 14.5. The operating conditions includes bio-oil mass rate per unit mass of catalyst (WHSV) = 1, 3 and 5 h−1; fluidizing medium velocity (u) = 0.075, 0.15 and 0.25 m/s; catalyst load = 0.06 kg and temperature (T) = 548, 573, and 598 K. From the results, it is understood that the phenol is a primary product with approximately 66% while the cyclopentanone (≈22%) and methanol (≈11%) are other products. The cyclopentanone production by HDO of guaiacol is favourable at high temperature whereas low temperature conditions favour production of methanol and phenol by HDO of guaiacol.
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