Microwave-assisted pyrolysis of oil palm shell biomass using an overhead stirrer

Oil palm shell biomass contains a high amount of lignin and thus has the potential to be converted into value-added products. If this biomass is not utilised efficiently, significant loss of valuable chemical products may occur, which otherwise can be recovered. In this paper, a new technique using an overhead stirrer to pyrolyse biomass under microwave (MW) irradiation was investigated. The ratio of biomass to activated carbon was varied to investigate its effect on the temperature profile, product yield and phenol content of the bio-oil. Interestingly, the microwave pyrolysis temperature could be controlled by varying the biomass to carbon ratio. The highest bio-oil yield and phenol content in bio-oil were obtained at a biomass to carbon ratio of 1:0.5. Chemical analyses of bio-oil were performed using FT-IR, GC-MS and H-1 NMR techniques. These results indicate that bio-oil consists mainly of aliphatic and aromatic compounds with high amounts of phenol in the bio-oil. Thus, MW pyrolysis with a stirrer successfully produced high-phenol bio-oil compared to other methods. This significant increase in bio-oil quality could either partially or wholly replace petroleum-derived phenol in many phenol-based applications. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.