Abstract
Lately, biomass, because of its abundance and sustainability has recently gained rising attention to produce various useful bio-products such as biochar. Biochar is the solid product obtained when biomass undergoes different thermochemical conversion processes. Examples of such are thermal liquefaction, gasification, and pyrolysis. Pyrolysis has, however, been reported as the most efficient for producing biochar owing to its huge biochar throughput and easy operation. The ability to effectively control its process conditions in producing biochar with desired physicochemical properties has also made pyrolysis the choicest to produce biochar. Although different feedstock has been reportedly used in its production, corncob waste has not been utilized to produce biochar in South Africa. Furthermore, most reports on the study of biochar have reported only the effect of a single or two process parameters on biochar’s yield and physicochemical characteristics. In this study, slow pyrolysis was used to produce corncob biochar from corncob waste in South Africa under the influence of three process parameters that are temperature, residence time and particle size. The temperature was varied between 300-900 ℃, residence time between 0.5-2 hrs, and particle size of 0.5-4.0 mm.The result fully validated the research hypothesis that temperature would have the mostsignificant impact on corncob biochar’s yield and physicochemical properties. Also, the influence of residence time and particle size was better understood when varied with temperature. The observations from this study would assist further research into optimization of pyrolysis process on the yield and physicochemical characteristics of corncob biochar for specific applications in South Africa.
M.Tech. (Chemical Engineering)