Biomass Chars: Elaboration, Characterization and Applications

This book contains the successful invited submissions [1–15] to a Special Issue of Energies on the subject area of “Biomass Chars: Elaboration, Characterization, and Applications”. The invited editors have decided to focus the Special Issue on the specific topic of biomass transformation and use. In fact, biomass can be converted to energy, biofuels, and bioproducts, via thermochemical conversion processes such as combustion, pyrolysis, and gasification. Combustion technology is most widely applied on an industrial scale. However, biomass gasification and pyrolysis processes are still in the research and development stage. The major products from these processes are syngas, bio-oil, and char (called also biochar for agronomic applications). Among these products, biomass chars have been receiving increasing attention for different applications such as gasification, co-combustion, catalyst or adsorbent precursors, soil amendment, carbon fuel cells, and supercapacitors. This Special Issue provides an overview for biomass chars production methods (pyrolysis, hydrothermal carbonization, etc.), the characterization techniques (scanning electronic microscopy, X-ray fluorescence, nitrogen adsorption, Raman spectroscopy, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, temperature programmed desorption, mass spectrometry, etc.), their properties and their suitable recovery processes. Topics of interest for the call included, but were not limited to the production of biochar for: