Influence of Additives on the Powder Flow of Dry Pinewood

With growing interest in converting woody biomass, developing a reliable design of feeders and lock-hoppers is vital towards having consistent and integrable feedstock flow into the reactors. But the poor flowability of woody biomass due to its fibrous and cohesive nature, and the knowledge gap in woody powders flow are significant roadblocks in this di-rection. To address this, we investigated the flow of powdered pinewood, an abundant ligno-cellulosic feedstock of importance for sustainable aviation fuels, phenolic resins, and other biogenic value-added products. As stirring hopper is also potential design to induce con-sistent flow of pinewood powder, we explored the effects of 1. Particle Size, 2. Total Mixture Load, 3. K2CO3 additive concentration, and 4. Stirring Speed, on the flow of dried pin-ewood. The focus was towards understanding the importance of the above parameters on the mass flowrate/discharge rate of pinewood powder and their capability to empty out of a stirring hopper. An L9 Taguchi method of design of experiments was utilized to gather and analyze the data to establish a ranking of the best parameters. Some additional tests were performed to observe the effects of changing a single parameter. This study revealed the po-tential for K2CO3 to act as flow-additive in the flow of fibrous pinewood, along with the rel-ative importance of design and operational parameters of a stirring hopper on pinewood of different size fractions was also achieved. These results are of significant value towards re-ducing scalability risks in the development of pinewood and other woody feedstock biore-fineries, such as gasifiers, liquefaction systems, and fast-pyrolyzers.