Joon Kyo Kim
Pronouns:
Research Mentor(s): Taehoon Han
Research Mentor School/College/Department: Mechanical Engineering / Engineering
Program: UROP
Session: Session 6 (3:40pm – 4:30pm)
Authors: Hannah Kim, Cristina Prall, Kathleen Alsup, Glenn Fox
Abstract
Biofuels are of great importance especially in the 21st century, where nations are striving to greatly reduce carbon emissions. The aviation industry in particular is pushing to reduce their carbon footprint using SAF (Sustainable Aviation Fuels) developed from sustainable resources. One such resource is algae; by performing HTL (Hydrothermal Liquefaction), and upgrading through a high-pressure and -temperature reaction, a biofuel in SAF grade can be produced. However, as are most other biofuels, the extracted biofuel yield rate is a concern, since biofuels must have good quality as well as a substantial yield rate to be a viable source of fuel. A good solution to this problem is the use of a co-solvent during HTL. Different alcohol-based co-solvents, including methanol, ethanol, and isopropyl-alcohol, when included with the sample during HTL, can potentially extract more biocrude from algae samples, as compared to the standard procedure that only uses deionized or DI water as the solvent. This could be because these powerful solvents can better cultivate thermal depolymerization, or the breakdown of plant cells to become usable bio-oil. In the experiments, a ratio of 10, 30, and 50% of each co-solvent relative to the algae-DI water mass was utilized and performed HTL to depolymerize the algae efficiently. Analyzing the resulting data and comparing them to the baseline procedure without any co-solvent showed that the yield rate for all three co-solvents generally improved, with 50% ethanol content performing the best at 48.8% more biofuel yield. The addition of co-solvents is not significantly impacting the quality of the biofuel, whether positively or negatively. As such, it can be concluded that the use of co-solvents, especially ethanol, during algal biocrude production will greatly increase its yield rate.
