A research on using biomass pyrolysis products to production of binder bitumen

Due to the rapid depletion of fossil resources, the use of renewable resources, especially for energy production, has become very important. Among renewable resources, biomass has an important place for energy production and chemical industry. It is clear that the production of bitumen, which is produced from petroleum and used as the most common road pavement material in the world, will also pose a serious problem with the decrease in oil production. For this reason, in recent years, the issue of bioasphalt production by modifying bitumen with the products obtained by pyrolysis methods from biomass sources has been intensively researched. It was thought that it would be advantageous to use the products obtained by pyrolysis of MDF powder, which is an industrial biomass with fine particle size, as bitumen material. In the study, the effects of temperature, mass flow rate and reactor occupancy fraction parameters on the pyrolysis of the pellet prepared from MDF powder in a continuous auger type pyrolysis reactor were investigated by design experiments using response surface method (YYY) and central composite design (MKD) techniques. In the optimization studies performed by using the liquid product yield on anhydrous basis as the response variable, the most suitable conditions were determined as 458 oC of pyrolysis temperature, 97 g/min of mass flow rate and 0.75 of reactor fullnes fraction values. Under these optimum conditions, the yields of anhydrous liquid, solid and noncondensable gas products were obtained as 26.13%, 22.05% and 32.06%, respectively. The dehydrated liquid product (biooil) by rotary evoporation and solid carbonized product (biochar) were subjected to various characterization tests. These biooil and biochar were used for bitumen-like mixture preparation. Modified bitumen samples were prepared by adding biooil, biochar and biooil-biochar mixture to standard B 70/100 bitumen. Traditional rheological analyzes and superpave tests of modified bitumen were performed and the results were examined. As a result, although it seems possible to use pyrolysis products for bitumen modification, it has been determined that while some properties are improved, some of them worsen as a result of modification with biochar and biooil.