Online residence time distribution measurement of thermochemical biomass pretreatment reactors

• Online electrical conductivity instrumentation rapidly quantifies RTD.
• NaCl is an effective tracer for thermochemical pretreatment of biomass slurry.
• Significant cost and time savings and more accurate compared with offline analysis.
• Mean residence time is significantly longer than theoretical.
• Model developed to predict true mean residence time.

Residence time is a critical parameter that strongly affects the product profile and overall yield achieved from thermochemical pretreatment of lignocellulosic biomass during production of liquid transportation fuels. The residence time distribution (RTD) is one important measure of reactor performance and provides a metric to use when evaluating changes in reactor design and operating parameters. An inexpensive and rapid RTD measurement technique was developed to measure the residence time characteristics in biomass pretreatment reactors and similar equipment processing wet-granular slurries. Sodium chloride was pulsed into the feed entering a 600 kg/d pilot-scale reactor operated at various conditions, and aqueous salt concentration was measured in the discharge using specially fabricated electrical conductivity instrumentation. This online conductivity method was superior in both measurement accuracy and resource requirements compared to offline analysis. Experimentally measured mean residence time values were longer than estimated by simple calculation and screw speed and throughput rate were investigated as contributing factors. A semi-empirical model was developed to predict the mean residence time as a function of operating parameters and enabled improved agreement.

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