Design and evaluation of biomass utilization systems

This thesis designs and evaluates systems to utilize two problematic biomass sources, hurricane debris and invasive water hyacinth, and turn costly cleanup efforts into opportunities for biofuel conversion systems. A novel solution is proposed for each biomass source and techno-economic models accounting for economic, energy, and carbon costs are used to evaluate different options for utilization. Hurricane debris is a feedstock that gets generated in vast quantities in an unpredictable manner, thus its main challenge is its supply chain. We propose a 30MW barge-mounted biofuel conversion system, which travels to hurricane-hit ports and converts debris into biofuels. For a 30MW plant, the break-even per-gallon revenue for profitability was found to be $5.28 per gallon of jet fuel for Fischer-Tropsch synthesis, $0.88 per gallon of heating oil for pyrolysis, and $1.07 per gallon of ethanol for fermentation.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2019

Author dc:creator

• Peng, Valerie.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Alexander Slocum.

• Mechanical Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/122105

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/122105