By Ellie S.
What is biomass?
In general: it is renewable organic material that comes from plants and animals. It is also the only form of renewable carbon in the world. Effective derivation of biomass may be able to replace fossil fuels.
For chemical research, the primary way to turn biomass feedstock into renewable fuel, charcoal, bio-oil, renewable diesel, methane, and hydrogen is called pyrolysis.
Others include:
- Hydrotreating: uses hydrogen to process bio-oil (produced by fast pyrolysis) under elevated temperatures and pressures in the presence of a catalyst to produce renewable diesel, renewable gasoline, and renewable jet fuel.
- Gasification: involves heating organic materials to between 1,400° F and 1,700 F (800° C and 900° C) in a vessel and injecting controlled amounts of free oxygen or steam into the vessel to produce a carbon monoxide- and hydrogen-rich gas called synthesis gas or syngas
For biological research: there’s lots of studies done on biomass conversion by fermentative bacteria, which might be interesting to look into.
Paper Background
Title: Reactant Concentrations-Mediated Void-Confinement Effects of TMPs@HCs Nanoreactors for Biomass Hydrodeoxygenation
Preliminary thoughts from the title itself:
- Nanoreactors: nano reactors are hollow spheres that allow reactions to occur inside the sphere or cavity by diffusing reactants inside
- Biomass hydrodeoxygenation – reaction that gets rid of oxygen functional groups
- Reactant concentrations – there was some kind of test done in relation to the reactant constants
What did they do?
Basically, reaction after pyrolysis creates a lot of organic material that is unstable due to the high presence of oxygen (oxygen functional groups) and a reaction by hydrodeoxygenation (HDO) gets rid of them.
In order to perform HDO properly, they needed to introduce Ni2P nanoreactors, effective due to:
- Ni2P having higher efficiency and stability compared to other metal phosphides
- Nano reactors have a higher reactivity due to the void confinement effect – doesn’t allow the outside to interfere with reactants and can increase concentrations inside the catalysis itself.
The reaction concentration and cavity size (hole size in the nano reactor) were tested for the most optimal size.
Catalyst were tested using multiple tests mentioned in the 3rd section
How did they do it
- Synthesis of the nano reactors
- In order to characterize the different catalysts and their effectivity – they used PXRD, XPS (not too sure about XPS, but will look into it) and TEM to produce some very cool pictures and graphs
- Testing catalyst activity and effectiveness
- Reactant concentration – 0.25, 0.5, 1mmol of HMT (precursor solution) -> determined cavity sizes
- Reactant and product yield was determined by spectroscopy
Results
Characterization:
- Peaks resulted in amorphous carbon and Ni2P – great in knowing the synthesis of the catalysts are correct
- Imaging shows the nanoparticle shells themselves
Effect:
- “void-confinement exhibited excellent void-confinement effects and reached the optimal catalytic effect up to 20% of vanillin concentration.”
- “Ni2P@ HCs-0.25 were tested. [optimal catalyst cavity size and reactant concentration] The catalyst still showed excellent activity in HDO reaction of different substrates, and the yield of the target product decreased only a little after being recycled 6 times, which proved its excellent stability and wide substrate applicability.
Reference
Note: this is intended to give summary of the paper, there are direct conclusion and discussions from the paper. All data and writing belong to the original authors: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acssuschemeng.3c03651
