Successful production of biofuels for liquid transportation will require deconstruction of biomass such as fast pyrolysis or hydrothermal liquefaction to produce bio-oils and biocrudes which are catalytically upgraded to produce hydrocarbons. Bio-oils are complex mixtures of many organic molecules with varying molecular weights, physical properties and functional groups. In the last few years, with support from the US-DOE, we have developed a suite of standardized methods to analyze and describe bio-oils. Understanding the suite of oxygenated functional groups in bio-oil is needed and we tested standardized methods to accurately describe the oxygenates present in bio-oils. Recently, we investigated the applicability of these methods for oils rich in sulfur and nitrogen such as HTL-oil based on algae. We found that the presence of some sulfur and nitrogen functional groups in bio-oil can affect the values generated by methods that were developed to measure the oxygen content in bio-oils. A discussion of the study will be presented.

Analysis of oxygenates in bio-oils

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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