Biomass and/or Plastic wastes Hydrothermal Liquefaction HTL Pilot Plant
The HTL Hydrothermal Liquefaction is a promising technology to convert a variety of material into biofuel and valuable chemical. HTL technology involves high temperature (300-400°C) and to high pressure (200-300barg) in presence of water. Feedstock could be a wide range of biomass (from microalgae to wood chips) or plastic waste. Main advantages of HTL technology is ability to process aqueous slurry, preventing need of a highly energy consuming drying step as required by other thermochemical technology pyrolysis, gasification, combustion. Bio-crude produced from HTL show high heating value and a significant oxygen amount. Catalyst could be added to drive selectivity to valuable product and reduce oxygen amount of bio-crude. Biomass co-processing pilot plant as manufactured by Vinci Technologies is typically a Continuous Stirrer Tank Reactor CSTR designed for high-temperature & high-pressure operation and allowing continuous feeding of biofeed and continuous recovery of gas, liquid and solid phases.
The HTL pilot plant can be briefly described by:
* a feed conditioning module (gas & liquid phase)
* a biofeed slury introduction module meeting
* a reaction module CSTR designed with bottom continuous recovery of solid phase where bio-crude is converted in valuable compounds by the help of high temperature & high pressure operation.
* a downstream module where gas are separated to liquid phase, follows by second separation stage where organic& aqueous are separated and specifically recovered.
