Bio-oil production by pyrolysis of biomass using hot blast furnace slag

In this paper, a new concept of a heat recovery system from blast furnace (BF) slag was proposed, which would generate bio-oil and combustible gas, and a direct contacting continuous operational pyrolysis reactor was designed to evaluate the feasibility. In addition, the influences of temperature and particle size of BF slag on pyrolysis characteristics of biomass were discussed. The results showed that bio-oil production by pyrolysis of biomass using waste heat from hot BF slag was reliable. In order to achieve a high bio-oil yield, moderate temperature, smaller BF slag particles and biomass particles were required. At temperature of 650 degrees C, BF slag with particle sizes below 2 mm and biomass particle sizes below 0.075 mm were used as test samples, the maximum bio-oil yield reached 57.3%. Crown Copyright (C) 2012 Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.