Review of thermal processing of biomass and waste in molten salts for production of renewable fuels and chemicals

Supercapacitors (electrochemical capacitors)

“…Among them, molten-salt carbonization, which can be considered as a derivative of HTC, continue gathering attention. In this very method, thermo-chemical decomposition of the biomass takes place in a bath of molten salt or their eutectics [133][134] , through which inert gas is passed at the temperature higher than 400°C. Alkali metal carbonates, halides, and nitrates are the essential ingredients of this bath.…”

Oil production from mild pyrolysis of low-rank coal in molten salts media

“…Molten salt is an ionic crystal which melts into ionic liquid at high temperature. Molten salt provides several advantages, such as large heat capacity, good dissolution ability, good thermal conductivity, and also it has a catalytic activity for certain reactions [27,28]. Recently, the molten salt has been exploited to assist many kinds of processes, such as for heat transfer fluid in nuclear power plant [29], heat storage media for solar power plant [30,31], electrolyte in the fuel cells system [32,33], and catalyst for chemical reactions [34,35].…”

“…However, most of their studies were focused on the gas production at high temperature. The use of molten salts to produce oil was done by Jiang et al [39] who utilized the mix of chloride salts and nitrate salts, but they found that due to the strong oxidizing effect of the salts, some of the obtained oil might undergo the secondary cracking reactions and thus increasing the gas yield [27,39]. In the present study, the ternary eutectic mix of carbonate salts (Li 2 CO 3 -Na 2 CO 3 -K 2 CO 3 ) was utilized as the media for pyrolyzing the low-rank coal to produce oil.…”

Combined molten salt–Ni/Al2O3 as synergistic medium for high-quality syngas production

“…On the other hand, Adinberg et al reported that a high fraction of undesired CH 4 in syngas was obtained from the pyrolysis of cellulose tablets in binary molten carbonate salt [2]. Methane significantly lowers the quality of syngas in the synthesis of value-added fuels and chemicals [19][20][21][22][23][24].…”