Measuring inorganics in biomass fast pyrolysis oils

Abstract Measurement of inorganics present in biomass fast pyrolysis liquids has been scarcely investigated in the literature. In this work several analytical methods based on different sample preparations were investigated and applied on a set of nine biomass fast pyrolysis liquids covering a wide range of inorganics contents that have been measured using an ICP-OES (Inductively Coupled Plasma-Optical Emission Spectrometer) analyser. Several required mineralisation first steps were studied to completely dissolve the samples. Our results show that the ISO 16967 method, initially developed for solid biomasses and adapted here for bio-oils, was the most interesting one to quantify three major inorganics (i.e. potassium, magnesium and sodium), measurement of calcium contents remaining a challenge when applied to bio-oils, while good results were obtained for reference materials.