Dr. Naoko Ellis Professor in CHBE, is a recipient of an NSERC Faculty Award and is currently leading research and graduate programs for the CHBE Department. She has been conducting innovative research on bio-oil stabilization, biodiesel production and blending, biomass and bio-oil gasification, fast pyrolysis and biochar-based catalysis. Ellis will lead the project on developing a low-cost, catalytic tar cracking reactor in collaboration with Dr. Xiaotao Bi, and researchers at Nexterra, Highbury Energy and Fraunhofer Institute.
Dr. Ellis’ group are working with the Tar Cracking System in the BRIC facility. This equipment forms the basis of a pilot-scale, catalytic tar cracking unit for clean-up of biomass gasification syngas, and will target the use of a unique, low-cost, iron catalyst made from Bauxite residue (BR), using a side stream of real syngas from the existing BRDF gasification facility. BR catalyst for catalytic cracking, developed in collaboration with Fraunhofer Institute and Nexterra, has a great potential to become an environmentally and economically viable technology for syngas clean-up. This pilot unit will be essential for the UBC gasification group to advance this technology toward commercialization. The pilot unit will be a catalytic reactor made of stainless steel, 50 mm in diameter, equipped with electrical heaters and temperature and pressure drop measurement. An existing gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC-MS) will be used to analyze the gas compositions at the inlet and outlet of the reactor to monitor the reactor’s performance.
Contact: Dr. Naoko Ellis, Project leader