Reactor for valorization through thermal processes

The high-pressure stirred reactor in CIRCE's laboratory allows for the valorization of various waste materials through thermal processes.

The flexibility of the system enables CIRCE to provide the following services:

• HTL (Hydrothermal Liquefaction) and HTC (Hydrothermal Carbonization): Processing various wet feedstocks such as biomass, algae, sludge, and complex waste streams.
• Experimental Studies: Improving the properties of bio-oils and synthetic oils (catalytically), such as removing heteroatoms (O, N, S) and reducing molecular weight. A typical process is upgrading through hydrotreatment.
• Other Thermochemical Studies: Valorizing biomass and waste (plastics, textiles, urban waste) through processes like solvolysis and depolymerization.
• Extraction of Bioactive Compounds and Chemical Building Blocks: Extracting from biomass, which can also be performed with MW-assisted technologies being developed at CIRCE.
• Mass Balances and Product Characterization: Characterizing the products of the previous processes, creating roadmaps for the obtained products (gases, oils, hydrochar), conducting catalytic screening studies, and optimizing process parameters (temperature, pressure, reaction time, agitation, use of catalysts and additives).

This versatile reactor can be used for a wide range of studies, utilizing different gas atmospheres (air, nitrogen, hydrogen) and media (water, organic solvents), as well as both homogeneous and heterogeneous catalysts. In terms of product analysis, our facilities include a gas chromatograph for analyzing gaseous products, and our environmental laboratory can provide characterization studies for the obtained liquid and solid products, such as gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) or inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectrometry (ICP-OES).