Submitted to: Meeting Abstract
Publication Type: Abstract Only
Publication Acceptance Date: 7/19/2016
Publication Date: N/A
Citation: N/A

Interpretive Summary:

Technical Abstract: Hot-water extraction (TM) (HWE) is a pretreatment technology designed to facilitate the subsequent hydrolysis of cellulose by removing the majority of the hemicellulose and ash content from the solid biomass. The HWE process generates salable sugars and other products as part of the process. The biomass remaining after HWE is primarily composed of cellulose and lignin and has low ash content in comparison to untreated biomass. These pronounced differences may also affect the products obtained via thermochemical conversion. Here, we report the fast pyrolysis of untreated shrub willow and HWE shrub willow biomass. The product yields and distributions from microwave pyrolysis do not vary much upon HWE pretreatment. However, the composition of the oils obtained display distinct differences. The aromatic hydrocarbon and phenolic content of the oils obtained from HWE shrub willow decreased by 15% and the oxygen content increased by approximately 25%. In addition, microscale pyrolysis-GC/MS experiments using HWE shrub willow produced higher concentrations of highly oxygenated compounds (levoglucosan and phenolics), which is consistent with the overall increase in oxygen content observed for the oils obtained from microwave pyrolysis. These results suggest that the HWE pretreatment process may have negative effects on the quality of the oils obtained from biomass pyrolysis. The combination of these two pyrolysis methods (microwave and py-GC/MS) provides further insight into the effects of the pretreatment process on thermochemical conversion.