Innovative derivation of sustainable energy from high moisture content biomass
Project Summary: Biomass is a renewable organic material that comes from plants and animals. It has been regarded as a promising alternative fuel to replace fossil fuels such as coal and natural gas. Currently around half the EU’s renewable energy is based on biomass. The quantity of wet biomass is massive, and it contains various wastes such as industrial sludge, digestate from anaerobic digestion, agricultural manure, and marine biomass such as seaweed. The traditional thermochemical measure to derive its renewable energy is however challenging as the moisture content in many types of biomass can be as high as 90%. Drying of such biomass is energy intensive and the whole process is not efficient to make benefit. The project aims to develop a highly efficient and sustainable route to treat the high moisture content biomass on-site applying a unique and advanced hydrothermal gasification technology. The proposed technology uses water as the reactant therefore no drying of feedstock is needed. It provides the first-of-its-kind highly efficient waste-to-Hydrogen and a negative CO2 emission solution. Agricultural waste from a farm and seaweed from a coast will be used as two case studies to demonstrate the advantages of the proposed technology.The proposed technology provides a potential demonstrable and commercial route to market and an innovative blue-Hydrogen production and negative CO2 emission solution which can be applied to the wide spectrum of wet biomass.
The student is expected to apply his/her research and analytical skills by employing the knowledge gained in course learning and conducting various research tasks such as industrial and agricultural data collection and processing, technical interpretation of the proposed system, economic evaluation, life cycle assessment methodology etc. The student also gets the great opportunity of collaborating with several partners from agriculture farms, renewable energy company (Samad Power Ltd and Materials Technology Centre) and local councils. The project provides the student with an insightful understanding of the status of sustainable energy technologies and desired skills and knowledge expected from renewable energy companies.
Training: The candidate will be trained to use characterization devices to measure the chemical and physical properties of selected samples, as well as simulation tools for preliminary techno-economic analysis.