ABSTRACT
System ............................................................................... 169 6.5 Engineering Obstacles and Challenges .................................................. 170
6.5.1 Reactor Designs .............................................................................. 170 6.5.2 Biomass Loading in the Feed ....................................................... 170 6.5.3 Salt Precipitation ............................................................................ 171 6.5.4 Catalyst Problems .......................................................................... 171
References ............................................................................................................. 171
The most advanced thermochemical technologies that convert biomass into value-added products, combustion (including co-ring with coal), gasication and pyrolysis, generally utilise dry biomass (usually with a moisture content of <20 wt%) as the feedstock. The need to process high-moisture content biomass fuels has led to the development of hydrothermal processing technologies. The term ‘hydrothermal’ originates from the geological domain (Jin and Enomoto 2009). Hydrothermal processing can be broadly dened as a technology that utilises subcritical or supercritical water medium at elevated temperature (typically 200°C-800°C) and pressure (typically 5-30 MPa) (Peterson et al. 2008; Pavlovic et al. 2013).
