Environmental issues surrounding the use of nonrenewable fuels for energy production, combined with increasingly tenuous access to fossil fuel stocks, have heighted our search for alternative, renewable, and environmentally safer energy sources. Members of the Agavaceae family grow on marginal, semi-arid soils that are not suitable for food crop cultivation, and these plants are highly drought tolerant. As such, their cultivation for biofuels does not compete with food or water resources. Hydrothermal carbonization is a potentially viable treatment for the conversion of this rather wet biomass to produce high energy solid biofuels without the need for an expensive drying step or severe reaction conditions. In the present work, hydrothermal carbonization of Agave Americana(AG) was carried out in a 2000 mL stainless steel reactor at temperatures between 180 and 250°C, over a fixed reaction time of 3 hours and a biomass to water ratio of 0.10. We explored the impact of reaction temperature on the energy, thermal, and chemical properties of the resulting AG hydrochars via calorimetry, thermogravimetry, proximate and ultimate analyses, and ATR-FTIR spectroscopy. Fixed carbon and elemental carbon content increased with HTC temperature, as did the higher heating value, from 16.6 MJ/kg up to 24.6 MJ/kg for the hydrochar produced at 250°C. FTIR analysis showed that HTC induced progressive carbonization and aromatization of the solid residue due to dehydration and decarboxylation reactions. Organic solvent extraction of hydrochars and preliminary CO2 activation experiments at 850 °C showed a possible route for the production of high valuable activated bio-char from the hydrothermally carbonized agave.

Production of sustainable biofuels and advanced carbon materials from the hydrothermal carbonization of Agave Americana

256th National Meeting (2018)

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