Water hyacinth for energy and environmental applications: A review

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Abstract

This review is focused on the sustainable management of harvested water hyacinth (WH) via thermochemical conversion to carbonaceous materials (CMs), biofuels, and chemicals for energy and environmental applications. One of the major challenges in thermochemical conversion is to guarantee the phytoremediation performance of biochar and the energy conversion efficiency in biowaste-to-energy processes. Thus, a circular sustainable approach is proposed to improve the biochar and energy production. The co-conversion process can enhance the syngas, heat, and energy productions with high-quality products. The produced biochar should be economically feasible and comparable to available commercial carbon products. The removal and control of heavy and transition metals are essential for the safe implementation and management of WH biochar. CMs derived from biochar are of interest in wastewater treatment, air purification, and construction. It is important to control the size, shape, and chemical compositions of the CM particles for higher-value products like catalyst, adsorbent or conductor.

Introduction

Water hyacinth (WH) is a free-floating aquatic plant that is of interest in wastewater management. For example, WH was demonstrated to remediate pond water contaminated with sewage (Qin et al., 2016). The WH biomass has been used as the adsorbents to remove heavy metals and the metal nanoparticles for pharmaceutical industries, photocatalysts, and biosensors due to its high cellulose and hemicellulose content, and various proteins in biomass tissues (Feng et al., 2017). Besides, WH biomass is a promising feedstock of making high-quality furniture and handicrafts such as baskets, decorative articles and mats (Rezania et al., 2015).

In the open literature, there are studies focused on the advances in the conversion and management of WH (Yan et al., 2017). WH has been developed as adsorbents for the treatment of textile effluent (Sanmuga Priya and Senthamil Selvan, 2017) and the removal of arsenic (Souza et al., 2018). There is a study by Sayago (2019), which concluded that WH is effective in phytoremediation process for the removal of heavy metals from wastewater and subsequently for bioethanol production, designing a sustainable process in flexible and diversified forms. In addition, WH is more suitable for bioethanol production when compared to metasequoia chips, sugarcane bagasse, miscanthus, and water peanut due to the special cellulose properties resulting in faster hydrolysis rate and lower byproduct yield (Li et al., 2014a, Li et al., 2014b). However, the harvested WH biowaste can pose health issues and present an environmental crisis without timely conversion and management. To address the topic of contaminant-enriched WH, this review emphasizes the energy and environmental applications of WH biowaste.

WH is suitable for energy recovery owing to its high carbon content (33.1–46.5%), hydrogen content (4.4–6.6%) and high heating value (13.1–18.4 MJ/kg) (Hu et al., 2015, Qin et al., 2016). Several studies focused on the application of WH for biogas and bioethanol production via anaerobic digestion (O'Sullivan et al., 2010, Sayago, 2019) and it was found that the cost of biogas produced from WH is 1.9 times higher of that from coal (Feng et al., 2017). Thermochemical conversion, including pyrolysis and gasification, is currently of great interest in the conversions of woody biomass, sewage sludge, and animal manures into gaseous product and solid residue e.g. biochar (Huang et al., 2018). Biochar has attracted attention due to its high surface area and surface properties, especially in the field of environmental management and remediation. Biochar can improve soil quality and nutrient retention capacity due to its high carbon content and flexible internal porosity (Ghosh et al. 2015). In addition, biochar can also contribute to mitigating climate change as a stable and safe form of carbon sequestration in the soil. Thus, converting WH to biochar through thermochemical conversion is a promising solution for the benefit of energy and environmental sustainability.

High moisture content is a critical issue for the conversion of aquatic biomass like WH. The simplest method would be drying the WH biomass under the sun. It was found that the size and shape of the feedstock may affect the dewatering process (Holmberg et al., 2016). Mechanical crushing into small pieces is an efficient pretreatment method in the drying of fresh biowaste (Bas-Bellver et al., 2020). Other alternative approaches include the use of water absorbent materials under high humidity environments (Lian et al., 2018), waste heat recovery from the thermochemical conversion system (Wachter et al., 2021) and the utilization of thermochemical conversion processes like hydrothermal liquefaction (Singh et al., 2015) and hydrothermal carbonization (Cui et al., 2020, Theppitak et al., 2020).

In a previous study on hydrothermal liquefaction, the harvested fresh WH was successfully converted into bio-oil consisting of many aromatic and aliphatic compounds at 280 °C, 15 min with a WH biomass-to-water ratio of 1:6 (Singh et al., 2015). Another study investigated the synergistic effect of Zn, Fe and the Zn + Fe, reaction time and temperature on the hydrothermal liquefaction of Lactuca scariola (Durak and Genel, 2020). The results show that Fe was the most effective catalyst with a light bio-oil yield of 12.82% and HHVs of 30.66 MJ/kg under the conditions of 300 °C and 15 min. Hydrothermal carbonization is also a promising technology in the processing of raw materials with a high moisture content such as WH, wastewater sludge, food waste and algae to produce valuable carbonaceous materials in an economically feasible way (Khoshbouy et al., 2019).

In a recent study, gasification of Sedum alfredii, a well-known Cd/Zn co-hyperaccumulator, was conducted at reaction temperatures of 300–900 ˚C and the distributions of Pb, Cd and Zn were analyzed in the solid-, liquid- and gas-phase (Cui et al., 2018). The results suggested that gasification has a high potential for both the separation and immobilization of contaminants from WH and the production of energy and multifunctional materials. Another study investigated the thermochemical conversion of WH into bioenergy and high-value products (Huang et al., 2020a, Huang et al., 2020b). The main pyrolytic products included phenols, furans and nitrides. Buller et al. (2015) reported the sustainability assessment of WH fast pyrolysis and found that WH-derived bio-oil was more renewable and sustainable than sugarcane ethanol and soybean biodiesel.

Previous research lacks a systematic review on the conversion of WH for energy and environmental applications, especially based on a circular economy (CE). Thus, this review shows how to utilize WH via thermochemical conversion to carbonaceous materials (CMs), biofuels, and chemicals for energy and environmental applications, and to emphasize the importance of a CE. We also comprehensively discuss the thermochemical conversion, energy conservation, and water treatment, the concept of CE, phytoremediation, and the capacity of WH. Additionally, a detailed environmental and techno-economic analysis is conducted from mathematical model, techno-economic analysis (TEA), life cycle assessment (LCA) and the implementation of CE. A circular sustainable approach is proposed for the improvement of phytoremediation and energy production. The technological and systems approach can be applied to other forms of aquatic biomass. Thus, this review provides a feasible approach in the conversion and management of aquatic biowaste and resources.

Section snippets

Assessment of phytoremediation capacity and efficiency (PCE)

Phytoremediation is increasingly attracting research attentions as a cost-effective approach for remediation of contaminants. WH has a strong phytoremediation potential because it can absorb the pollutant metals including Pb, Zn, Ni, Hg, Cr and As (Ali et al., 2020). WH can also absorb the nutrients of nitrogen and phosphorous to control eutrophication (Qin et al., 2016). Thus, the phytoremediation capacity and efficiency (PCE) are evaluated in this section to highlight the role of WH in

WH for various applications

Biochar derived from WH shows the potential for the generation of carbonaceous materials (CMs) and solid fuels (Rahman, 2018). The produced bio-oil is of interest for value-added chemicals and biofuels. WH has also been reported as feedstock for biogas production via liquid anaerobic digestion (Nugraha et al., 2018). The applications of the WH for carbonaceous materials (CMs), biofuels, and chemicals have been discussed in the following sections.

Research needs and future directions

Water hyacinth is of interest for biochar production due to its high biomass yield, high carbon content, and environmental benefits for carbon sequestration and pollutants removal. Thermochemical conversion has attracted attention to design a renewable process for biochar production for both separation and immobilization of contaminants from WH and the production of energy and multifunctional materials. It is feasible to achieve a circular bioeconomy approach in phytoremediation using WH for

Conclusions

Biowaste can potentially cause negative impacts on the local ecosystems, leading to health issues and environmental crisis. This review provides a feasible approach via thermochemical conversion of aquatic biowaste into CMs, biofuels, and chemicals for energy and environmental applications. It is important to combine risk assessment, machine learning, process modelling, and auto-control technologies to enhance energy conversion efficiency, waste stream reutilization, and phytoremediation.

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

This research program is funded by the National Research Foundation (NRF), Prime Minister's Office, Singapore, under its Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise (CREATE) program, grant Number R-706-001-102-281. Subhadip Ghosh, Chi-Hwa Wang and Hugh Tan acknowledge the funding support by Singapore National Parks Board under the grant numbers R279-000-611-490 & R279-000-611-495.

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