Glucose gasification in near critical water conditions for both syngas production and green chemicals with a continuous process

The paper reports on experiments of glucose gasification with water near critical point. The adoption of these process conditions revealed advantages in terms of biomass conversion efficiency as the resulting liquid phase includes some important compounds (HFM, furfural). Tree phases were produced, collected and then analysed: solid (23% w/w) liquid (70%) and gas (7%). The predominance of non gaseous phase can be attributed to the fact that operation condition are near the water critical point instead of effective supercritical conditions. Composition data are average value of 3 repetitions and mass balance rules was verified in all runs and a good agreement was found with open literature data. The solid residual in the reaction chamber was added to that suspended in the liquid fraction and the obtained mass was dried (T = 105 C) and resulting in about 90 g with 50% moisture content. Also the effect of NaOH, active in gasification reactions was investigated. Results revealed a good impact in liquid yield and composition, whilst carbon dioxide amount increased in the resulting gas phase. A reaction scheme is also proposed to justify these experimental evidences. © 2013 Published by Elsevier Ltd.