Mele, Mahmuda Akter, Kumar, Ravinder, Sanislav, Ioan, and Antunes, Elsa (2026) Utilization of gold-loaded ironbark biochar-based catalyst for catalytic upgrading of spent coffee grounds: reaction kinetics, products distribution, and mechanism. Biomass Conversion and Biorefinery, 16. 135.

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Abstract

To reduce dependence on fossil fuels and limit environmental impacts, converting abundant and low-cost lignocellulosic biomass into renewable energy products is essential. While biomass-derived biochar is widely used in environmental and agricultural applications, its role as a catalyst or catalytic support has received far less attention. In this study, we develop a novel biochar-based catalyst and demonstrate its effectiveness in the catalytic pyrolysis of spent coffee grounds (SCG), leading to enhanced production of valuable hydrocarbons and phenols. This work reveals a new and underexplored application of biochar in sustainable energy and chemical generation. The adsorption method was adopted for the preparation of gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) loaded into ironbark biochar (IBBC) catalysts. The characterization by BET, XRD, FTIR, SEM-EDS findings confirmed the successful preparation of AuNPs-IBBC catalyst. SCG biomass, without-metal catalyst showed the lowest hydrocarbon production. However, incorporating the AuNPs-IBBC into the process led to an increase in the production of aromatics, as well as aliphatic hydrocarbons. The biochar surface functionalities coupled with gold increased the aromatics selectivity two-fold (from 4.5 to 9.9%) and phenols (from 2.4 to 5.5%) with the IBBC-BC1 catalyst. At 750 °C pyrolysis temperature with the BC1 catalyst, hydrocarbon production was the highest compared to other catalysts. The BC1 catalyst favored C4–C11 hydrocarbons with a selectivity of 6%. The BC1 catalyst has demonstrated an enhanced pore volume of 0.089 cm³/g, accompanied by an average pore diameter of 3.182 nm. TGA results showed significant weight reduction rates and increased thermal degradation rates after catalytic pyrolysis of SCG. Therefore, it could be suggested that gold-loaded biochar catalyst can upgrades the SCG biomass to produce value-added chemicals.

Item ID:	92560
Item Type:	Article (Research - C1)
ISSN:	2190-6823
Copyright Information:	This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Date Deposited:	07 Sep 2026 23:46
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