Twente University participated in the “Call for papers” for the chance to present at World Sustainable Energy Days – WSED a big event for biomass, held in Wel, Austria, which encompasses six conferences. This call for papers is a tough competition in which only the articles of the highest quality are accepted for oral presentation, the rest to be presented as a poster. This year the conference received the highest number of submissions with 90 abstracts received from 40 different countries, and very few selected for the oral presentation (last year, only 25 oral presentations were selected).
Despite slim odd, the paper written by Twente University in conjunction with EBIO project has been selected for oral presentation!
It is a huge achievement for the EBIO project to present at this event that significantly impacts the biomass community.
The abstract of the paper is as follows:
“Electrochemical upgrading of pyrolysis oil by electro-decarboxylation is an attractive pathway because of near ambient operating conditions, minimal risk and its potential to produce hydrocarbons and hydrogen. Considering that GC-MS results highlight that the major fraction of pyrolysis oil is composed of carboxylic acids and sugars, we first used acetic acid as the model compound. Here, decarboxylation on platinum and BDD electrodes resulted in high faradaic efficiency to ethane (92% on Pt) or methanol (82.3% on BDD), respectively. Using the aqueous phase (50 wt.%) of pyrolysis oil only, we afterwards report the semi-quantitative NMR analysis of treated oil. Contrasting the results obtained with acidic acid using electrolysis with boron-doped diamond (BDD) and Pt electrodes at a moderated current density of 25 mA/cm2, we show that electrochemical treatment primarily results in an increase in alcohol functional groups. Yet the complexity of the liquid renders more detailed analysis difficult. Thus, it is suggested that the separation of carboxylic acids is essential to achieve electrochemical targeted decarboxylation towards Kolbe or non-Kolbe products, and in general, this study highlights that treating pyrolysis oil is still a major challenge, likely requiring multiple electrochemical processing steps for upgrading.”
For more information, please contact Talal Ashraf (UT-TNW) t.ashraf@utwente.nl