PhD Theses

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Browsing PhD Theses by Subject "Biomass conversion"

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    Modeling of fast pyrolysis of biomass for bio-oil production
    (University of Dar es Salaam, 2015) Said, Mahir Mohammed
    Biomass processing and use can meet the challenge of reducing fossil resources by producing a liquid feedstock that can lessen the fossil dependence and meet the increased demand via rapidly emerging thermochemical technologies such as pyrolysis. The main objective of this research work was to develop a mathematical model for fast pyrolysis of biomass for liquid fuel (bio-oil) production. Few tropical biomass types have been studied for pyrolysis and nothing has been previously studied on the effect of mixing of different varieties of biomass for production of bio-oil. This research studied the pyrolysis of six tropical biomass materials of eucalyptus, pine, mangrove, cashew-nut shells, coconut husk and rice husk. The chemical and physical properties were studied to enable to develop the model that predicts the yields of bio-oil. Good agreement of the developed model and existing models were observed for all biomass except rice husk and coconut husk whose deviations were above 10%. The validation of the model with experimental results gave a variation of less than 10% for all biomass materials. Cashew nut shells and eucalyptus produced about 0.7 wt/wt yields of bio-oil. Mangrove and pine produced about 0.6 wt/wt yields and the least bio-oil yield was observed from coconut husk and rice husk which was about 0.5 wt/wt yields. The maximum yield of mixed biomass was about 0.5 wt/wt, and the gas produced was 0.95 wt/wt. It is concluded that the model works in both forest and agricultural biomass. The model is also flexible enough to predict the yield even if the biomass is in the mixed form.