Axel Funke

TL;DR: In this article, a review summarizes knowledge about the chemical nature of this process from a process design point of view, including reaction mechanisms of hydrolysis, dehydration, decarboxylation, aromatization, and condensation polymerization.

TL;DR: The wet pyrolysis process, also known as hydrothermal carbonization, opens up the field of potential feedstocks for char production to a range of nontraditional renewable and plentiful wet agricultural residues and municipal wastes as discussed by the authors.

TL;DR: The main research directions in the hydrothermal conversion of biomass into fuels and carbon throughout gasification to produce H2 or CH4, liquefaction to produce crude oils and phenols from lignin as well as carbonization to produce carbonaceous materials which can be either used as fuels (carbon negative chars) or interesting energetic materials (hydrothermal carbons).

TL;DR: This paper presents a set of calorimetric measurements with the aim of better understanding the calorific nature of hydrothermal carbonization, and finds their accuracy is considerably higher than previously published results.

TL;DR: In this article, the difference between hydrothermal carbonization and vapothermal carbonization for the densification of the energy content of biomass has been investigated systematically for the first time, and the experiments show that the process efficiency can be increased due to two reasons: the carbon losses in the liquid phase are decreased and less water needs to be heated up during carbonization.