Design and Development of Hydrothermal Liquefaction System to Extract Essential Oil from Herbal Biomass
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Date
2019
Authors
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Publisher
MPUT, UDAIPUR
Abstract
The present research was carried out to design and develop a hydrothermal liquefaction system
to extract essential oil from herbal biomass and to evaluate the developed system on the basis
of its thermal performance and economics. The experimental research work was carried out at
Department of Renewable Energy Engineering, College of Technology and Engineering,
Udaipur. The developed system was designed to operate on batch type unit for small scale
which will be adoptable for the farmers in rural areas. The herbal biomass selected to perform
the experiment was Lemongrass collected and harvested from Organic Farm of Rajasthan
College Agriculture (RCA), MPUAT, Udaipur (Rajasthan). Lemongrass samples were shade
dried for 72 hours and moisture content was reduced to 7.80%. 2 kg per batch of such sample
was taken for performing each experiment. Before performing the experiment, characterization
of the lemongrass samples was done. Results obtained for initial moisture content for fresh
lemongrass was 65.32%, total soilds 34.64%, total volatile solids 30.17%, Ash content 4.5o%
and bulk density 100 kg/m3.
The performance evaluation of the developed system was carried out in actual working
conditions by observing the performance of the system under different independent parameters
such as residence time of 60 min and 120 min, operating temperature of 100oC, 98oC and 95oC,
fuel feeding rate 57.14 g/min, 45.16 g/min, 50.2 g/min and 42.42 g/min and size of the sample
5 cm and 15 cm. The essential oil yield obtained from lemongrass (shade drying for 72 h), was
observed as 1.50%, 0.95%, 1.20% and 1.06%. The thermal performance was evaluated for the
steam generator and charge reactor by calculating its energy balance and thermal efficiencies.
At the steam generator, the experiments performed at A, B, C and D recorded a thermal
efficiency of 58%, 57.46%, 60.77% and 63.3% respectively. The thermal efficiency calculated
at the charge reactor end for experiments A, B, C and D were 71.75%, 66.27%, 70.2% and
65.5% respectively. The overall efficiency for experiment A, B, C and D were 42%, 38%, 43%
and 41% respectively.
From the analysis of economics of the developed system, the payback period of the developed
system was found to be 4 months, the net present value of the developed system by assuming
life of the system as 10 years was 14,79,910 Rs/- benefit cost ratio was calculated as 1.48 and
internal rate of return was 389.784%.
Description
Design and Development of Hydrothermal Liquefaction System to Extract Essential Oil from Herbal Biomass
Keywords
Citation
Aier I. And Panwar N.L.