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Rheology measurements of a biomass slurry: an inter-laboratory study

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Abstract

The conversion of biomass, specifically lignocellulosic biomass, into fuels and chemicals has recently gained national attention as an alternative to the use of fossil fuels. Increasing the concentration of the biomass solids during biochemical conversion has a large potential to reduce production costs. These concentrated biomass slurries have highly viscous, non-Newtonian behavior that poses several technical challenges to the conversion process. A collaborative effort to measure the rheology of a biomass slurry at four separate laboratories has been undertaken. A comprehensive set of rheological properties were measured using several different rheometers, flow geometries, and experimental methods. The tendency for settling, water evaporation, and wall slip required special care when performing the experiments. The rheological properties were measured at different concentrations up to 30% insoluble solids by mass. The slurry was found to be strongly shear-thinning, to be viscoelastic, and to have a significant concentration-dependent yield stress. The elastic modulus was found to be almost an order of magnitude larger than the loss modulus and weakly dependent on frequency. The techniques and results of this work will be useful to characterize other biomass slurries and in the design of biochemical conversion processing steps that operate at high solids concentrations.

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Acknowledgements

This work was funded in part by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of the Biomass Program and in part by the National Research Initiative of the USDA Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service, grant number 2006-35504-17401. J. Stickel would like to thank Christine Roche for help with sample preparation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Bioenergy Center, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Golden, CO, 80401, USA

    Jonathan J. Stickel

  2. Department of Chemical Engineering, Colorado School of Mines, Golden, CO, USA

    Jeffrey S. Knutsen & Matthew W. Liberatore

  3. Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, University of Maine, Orono, ME, USA

    Wing Luu & Douglas W. Bousfield

  4. Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering and Rheology Research Center, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, USA

    Daniel J. Klingenberg, Thatcher W. Root, Max R. Ehrhardt & Thomas O. Monz

  5. U.S. Forest Service Forest Products Laboratory, Madison, WI, USA

    C. Tim Scott

Authors
  1. Jonathan J. Stickel
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  2. Jeffrey S. Knutsen
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  3. Matthew W. Liberatore
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  4. Wing Luu
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  5. Douglas W. Bousfield
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  6. Daniel J. Klingenberg
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  7. C. Tim Scott
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  8. Thatcher W. Root
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  9. Max R. Ehrhardt
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  10. Thomas O. Monz
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Correspondence to Jonathan J. Stickel.

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Stickel, J.J., Knutsen, J.S., Liberatore, M.W. et al. Rheology measurements of a biomass slurry: an inter-laboratory study. Rheol Acta 48, 1005–1015 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00397-009-0382-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00397-009-0382-8

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