Prediction of sustainable aviation fuel properties for liquid hydrocarbons from hydrotreating biomass catalytic fast pyrolysis derived organic intermediates

Abstract

Catalytic fast pyrolysis (CFP) of wood, woody residues, and agricultural waste has the potential to produce organic liquid intermediates that can be hydroprocessed to sustainable aviation fuels (SAF). In this article we present results of property predictions for two SAF fuels produced from hydroprocessing of CFP-based oxygenated organic intermediates followed by distillation to obtain the jet boiling range cuts. The two intermediates, in turn, were produced using ZSM-5 and Pt/TiO₂ catalysts. The objective is to assess the applicability of recently developed prediction methods and other well-established methods to CFP-derived SAF fuels, focusing on five properties that are important for jet fuel certification, namely density, flash point, net heat of combustion, freezing point, and distillation temperatures (10% distilled and final boiling point). For flash point and net heat of combustion, several of the methods tested gave comparable results with mean absolute errors (MAE) that are within the reproducibility limit of the data. The API and ASTM D7215 methods provided the best results for flash point, while the ASTM D3338 correlation gave the lowest MAE for net heat of combustion. For density at 15 °C, the MWA method of Shi et al. gave the lowest MAE of 0.0033 g cm⁻³, however, it is still larger than the reproducibility limit of 0.0005 g cm⁻³. The accuracy of the prediction methods for freezing point could not be assessed since the experimental data of the two SAF fuels were given as <−70 °C. The distillation temperatures were not well predicted by the method tested.