Abstract
In this work, the characteristics of wood degradation using supercritical alcohols have been studied. Supercritical ethanol and supercritical methanol were used as solvents. The kinetics of wood degradation were analyzed using the nonisothermal weight loss technique with heating rates of 3.1, 9.8, and 14.5 °C/min for ethanol and 5.2, 11.3, and 16.3 °C/min for methanol. Three different kinetic analysis methods were implemented to obtain the apparent activation energy and the overall reaction order for wood degradation using supercritical alcohols. These were used to compare with previous data for supercritical methanol. From this work, the activation energies of wood degradation in supercritical ethanol were obtained as 78.0â86.0, 40.1â48.1, and 114 kJ/mol for the different kinetic analysis methods used in this work. The activation energies of wood degradation in supercritical ethanol were obtained as 78.0â86.0, 40.1â48.1, and 114 kJ/mol. This paper also includes the analysis of the liquid products obtained from this work. The characteristic analysis of liquid products on increasing reaction temperature and time has been performed by GC-MS. The liquid products were categorized according to carbon numbers and aromatic/aliphatic components. It was found that higher conversion in supercritical ethanol occurs at a lower temperature than that of supercritical methanol. The product analysis shows that the majority of products fall in the 2 to 15 carbon number range.
Highlights
When the World is seeking an environmentally benign fuel source, supercritical techniques can be a good support for other available technologies
It can be seen that with increased heating rate the weight loss curves of wood degradation were displaced to higher temperatures due to the heat transfer lag
The conversion increased with the increase of reaction temperature and holding time, and the conversions in SCE were higher than those of SCM. This result is similar to the experimental results of weight loss for the kinetic analysis of Figure 2, which shows the possibility that ethanol can act as a better solvent under supercritical conditions
Summary
When the World is seeking an environmentally benign fuel source, supercritical techniques can be a good support for other available technologies. Due to the limitations of homogeneous and heterogeneous catalytic reactions for biodiesel production from biomass, a sustainable and environmentally friendly technology using supercritical alcohol (SCA) has been receiving considerable attention. The advantages of supercritical fluid (SCF) technology in biodiesel production compared to conventional catalytic reactions are enormous and vital in solving issues involving energy security in the future. Having a density close to liquids, the supercritical fluid has the ability to dissolve many components, whereas the high diffusivity and low viscosity of the supercritical fluid enable it to behave like a gas Such mobility properties of the supercritical fluid tend to maximize the yields of the products. Degradation using SCA were studied in this work, but factors including hard reaction conditions, complicated compositions of degradation products, and difficulty of continuous operation tend to limit the kinetic study on the wood degradation in SCF.
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