In
this article, supercritical water gasification of biocrude at
different conditions was performed and compared to each other. Three
scenarios were considered while treating biocrude originating from
cattle manure (CM) and corn husk (CH), namely, uncatalyzed feedstock,
catalyzed with 10% Ni–0.08% Ru/Al2O3 and
finally catalyzed with 10% Ni–0.08% Ru/Al2O3–ZrO2. It was found that 10% Ni–0.08%
Ru/Al2O3–ZrO2 has performed
significantly better than the other two scenarios over the 5 hour
run time with a 193 and 187% higher hydrogen yield compared to the
uncatalyzed and 10% Ni–0.08% Ru/Al2O3 catalyzed scenarios, respectively. Compared to CM gasification in
the presence of a 10% Ni–0.08% Ru/Al2O3–ZrO2 catalyst, the catalyst got deactivated because
of the high phenol and furan content in the corn husk biocrude, therefore
hydrogen yield performance fell significantly. It was observed that
the carbon gasification efficiency of the biocrude was independent
of temperature. In terms of carbon conversion, the equilibrium conditions
for the biocrude considered were attained at lower temperature. A
mechanistic model based on the Eley–Rideal method was devised
and tested against the obtained data. The dissociation of adsorbed
oxygenated hydrocarbon is found to be the rate-determining step with
an average absolute deviation of 3.55%.