Abstract
Effort to seek sustainable renewable energy has been focused since the past decades in view of the diminishing of petroleum and natural gas reserves. Bio-oil that can be obtained from biomass, has a complex, diverse, and large carbon range content in its current state, as opposed to gasoline's carbon range and lower hydrocarbon that can be used as fuel and intermediate products. Unfortunately, no specific thermodynamic study was conducted on the transformation of bio-oil into light hydrocarbon. The long and complex carbon chain of bio-oil could be cracked into smaller carbon compounds in order to make use of its abundance availability. Thermodynamic equilibrium analysis of bio-oil model compound to light hydrocarbons using overall Gibbs method of minimizing free energy was performed in this study. The composition of the equilibrium product for co-cracking of hydroxypropanone as model compound was determined in the following ranges: temperature, 300-1200 °C; HMR (hydroxypropanone/methanol ratio) and HER (hydroxypropanone/ethanol ratio), 1:12,1:6,1:3,1:1, 2:1 and pressure, 1 bar. Analysis of the feasible reactions found that main products were hydrogen, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, while the formation of light hydrocarbons was not spontaneous. In comparison to other products, the amount of ethylene, methane, and ethane produced was very small. HMR 2:1, at temperature 1,200 °C and pressure 1 bar and HER 2:1, at 1,200 °C and pressure 1 bar were the optimum conditions for ethylene production.
