This study examined the conversions of biomass and biomass components to petrochemicals and total aliphatic gasoline like products. The whole research work focus on catalysis, mechanism and identification. There are three major projects in the study. Since biomass is very complicated, to understand the thermal decomposition pathways of biomass, pyrolytic behaviors of various biomass components including lignin and cellulose under different reaction conditions were investigated in the first phase. Due to complexity and limited volatility, the thermal decomposition products from biomass bring insurmountable obstacles to traditional analysis methods such as GC-MS, UV and FT-IR. Therefore, precise characterization of the whole portion of thermal decomposition products has significant impacts on providing insights into the pyrolysis pathways and evaluating the upgrading processes. Various NMR methods to characterize different functional groups presented in liquid and solid pyrolysis products by 1H, 13C, 31P, 2D-HSQC and solid state 13C-NMR were introduced in the second phase. Nevertheless, the major drawback towards commercialization of pyrolysis oils are their challenging properties including poor volatility, high oxygen content, molecular weight, acidity and viscosity, corrosiveness and cold flow problems. In situ upgrading the properties of pyrolysis oils during thermal conversion process by employing zeolites and metal salts has been discussed in the third phase. The further hydrogenation of pyrolysis oils to total aliphatic gasoline like products by heterogeneous catalysis in �green medium� � water has also been examined in the third project. To develop a universal technique, which could provide insights into the mechanisms and intermediates for the upgrading processes (HYD, HDO, SRO etc.), isotopic tracing and in-situ NMR monitoring have been proposed. This proposed method exhibited its powerful capabilities for identifying the reaction intermediates and the results perfectly match with computational simulations.

Thermal conversions of biomass and biomass components to biofuels and bio-chemicals � a study of catalysis, mechanism, and identification

248th National Meeting (2014)

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