Aprovechamiento energético de subproductos de origen animal mediante licuefacción hidrotérmicaAnálisis de ciclo de vida

Abstract

The present research work is developed to give an alternative response to the current technologies of elimination and / or use of the animal by-products (ABP) and to revalorize these by-products. The meat waste generated in the slaughterhouses, processed food and dead farm animals are considered ABP and are subject to strict legislation that regulates their handling and management. Among other aspects, the legislation classifies by-products according to their potential hazard and defines the possible uses and disposed as waste. The most dangerous by-products (Category 1) must be incinerated, previously buried, sterilized and marked or used in the production of biodiesel, biogas or combustion processes. The medium hazard byproducts (Category 2), besides the previous uses, can be used to manufacture fertilizer and only the nonhazardous ABP (Category 3) can be transformed by rendering into feed of pets and fur animals. This Ph.D. thesis studies the viability of the process of obtaining biofuel by hydrothermal liquefaction of animal by-products and their rendering products. The thesis is structured in three parts. The first part offers an updated overview of animal by-products (Chapter 1) as well as an introduction to the fundamentals of biomass conversion and hydrothermal liquefaction technology (Chapters 2 and 3). The second part describes the experimental process carried out at the laboratory scale (Chapter 4), the comparative studies between hydrothermal liquefaction and the pyrolysis of ABP and the rendering products (Chapter 5), and the analysis of the influence of the operating parameters on the liquefaction of this raw material (Chapters 6 and 7). The third and last part of this report presents the studies related to the scale-up of the process to a pilot plant level (Chapter 8) and the evaluation of the life cycle and process cost analysis (Chapter 9). This thesis is highly interdisciplinary because it is a combination of chemical engineering, organic, inorganic, physical and analytical chemistry.