Hydrogenation of Bio-Oil Model Compounds over Raney-Ni at Ambient Pressure

Abstract

Lignocellulosic biofuels are the most promising sustainable fuels that can be added to the crude oil pool to refill the dwindling fossil resources. In this work, we tested a Raney-Ni catalyst for the hydrogenation of four bio-oil model compounds and their binary mixtures to assess their reactivity under mild conditions suitable for bio-oil stabilization preceding green diesel production from lignocellulosic biomass. The hydrogenation experiments were performed at ambient hydrogen pressure at temperatures in the range 30–70 °C. Raney-Ni was found to hydrogenate all investigated model compounds efficiently; both carbonyl groups and double bonds were saturated. In addition, it was also active in the demethoxylation of guaiacol. When studying the binary mixtures, furfuryl alcohol was found to significantly inhibit the hydrogenation of the other model compounds (guaiacol and methyl isobutyl ketone) due to their very strong adsorption.

Study of selective hydrogenation of biodiesel in a DBD plasma reactor

“…Raney-Ni (with a particle diameter of 0.1 mm, a specific surface area of 131 m 2 g −1 , and a pore volume of 0.20 ml g −1 ) was selected as the hydrogenation catalyst, due to its high activity at low temperatures and large specific surface area [27][28][29][30][31][32][33].…”