Stevens Institute of Technology
IN-4: Innovation 4

Stevens students with the guidance of Professor Lawal, and BASF Catalysts LLC, initially had the long-term goal was to design, evaluate, and integrate innovative reactor technologies with novel catalyst formulations for distributed biomass-to-fuel processing. We have developed and demonstrated a process by which biomass waste (e.g. switchgrass, wood, farm waste and crop residues (corn stover and wheat straw)) can be converted to standard transportation fuel (diesel) through a series of process steps. This product fuel is a direct substitute for commercially available fuels for industrial and public use. The process is scalable and can be commercialized for small mobile units to serve local communities, or assembled for large scale fuel and electricity production when inputs come from nearby energy-crop or other agricultural operations.

• Designed and fabricated an integrated fully-automated pyrolyzer system comprising an auger pyrolyzer as well as a fluidized-bed pyrolyzer to produce pyrolysis oil (PO) • Designed and fabricated a fully-automated ATR reactor system for converting PO to syngas • Designed and fabricated a fully-automated laboratory reactor system for Fischer-Tropsch conversion of syngas to diesel. • Performed successfully the Auto-thermal Reforming (ATR) of aged as well as fresh samples of whole pyrolysis oil (PO) using the BASF dual layer monolith catalyst. • Produced syngas from pyrolysis oil with tunable H2/CO ratio in the range of 1.8 – 4.0. • Determined the optimum process parameters (H2O/C, O2/C, temperature, and GHSV) for the production of syngas. • Developed an effective catalyst regeneration procedure for mitigating reversible deactivation and proposed approaches for preventing irreversible catalyst deactivation. • Performed a comprehensive techno-economic analysis of the integrated process which indicated (1) net energy recovery of 49% accounting for all losses and external energy input, (2) weight of diesel oil produced as a percent of the biomass to be ~14%, and (3) for a ‘demonstration’ size biomass to FT liquid plant of ~ 2000 daily barrels of diesel, the price of the diesel produced is ~$3.30 per gallon, ex. tax.