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Fast-rising population and economic growth are inducing a rapid increase in the energy demand. To date, fossil fuels constitute the primary energy source, but their combustion emits greenhouse gases responsible of global warming. Therefore, developing environment-friendly energy sources is critical. For instance, pyrolysis converts biomass into valuable compounds such as syngas, biochar, and bio-oil, yet produced bio-oil and biogas require further upgrading processes before their use. Current processes include gasification, purification, separation, and catalytic pyrolysis. For syngas synthesis, applying one or a couple of these processes leads to low product yields since they favor the production of bio-oil or biogas. Moreover, tar formation during biomass pyrolysis remains a major technological issue in reactor design. Catalytic reforming is an attractive and efficient method for tar removal via tar oxidation into valuable gases. More importantly, catalytic reforming of pyrolysis volatile products constitutes a promising approach for both tar removal and biogas conversion into syngas. Here, we review the two major catalytic approaches of biomass valorization: catalytic pyrolysis and pyrolysis-catalytic reforming. We demonstrate that the catalytic pyrolysis mainly upgrades bio-oil, while pyrolysis-catalytic efficiently converts biomass into syngas. We analyze the effects of temperature and steam-to-carbon ratio on the products derived from coupling the pyrolysis of agricultural biomass waste to catalytic reforming. Increasing the temperature and steam-to-carbon ratio enhances hydrogen yield. A complete conversion of pyrolysis volatile products into syngas was obtained at 600 °C with steam-to-carbon ratio of 4 for pinewood biomass and nickel catalyst. The use of nickel catalyst supported on lanthana–alumina Ni/La2O3-αAl2O3 for the steam reforming of raw bio-oil produced from pine sawdust pyrolysis enhanced the yields of hydrogen and carbon monoxide, reaching 95% and 93%, respectively, at 700 °C and steam-to-carbon of 15.

In the present paper, an application of infrared thermography to inverse heat conduction problems is presented. The study involves the identification of conductive losses at the jaws of a tensile testing machine, which must be assessed in situ, because of variable fastening conditions of the specimen, inducing variable thermal resistances at the jaws. For this purpose, a photo-thermal technique has been developed to identify all the heat exchanges of the sample. An optical excitation, based on a halogen lamp projector, illuminates the specimen in situ on the tensile machine, while the radiative flux excitation is measured using a photodiode. The conductive fluxes are identified, transient and steady, then the equivalent exchange coefficients at the jaws. For this purpose, a direct numerical model by finite differences and an inverse procedure allow to estimate these exchange coefficients. The resolution of the inverse problem is based on the optimization by the conjugate gradient method, of a least square criterion between the temperatures measured by infrared thermography and the temperatures calculated from the direct model.

A standard 75-cl bottle of champagne holds about 5 l of dissolved carbon dioxide (CO2). When pouring champagne into a glass, a significant part of dissolved CO2 desorbs from the liquid phase (Liger-Belair in J Agric Food Chem 53:2788–2802, 2005; Liger-Belair et al. in Chem Soc Rev 37:2490–2511, 2008a). As CO2 is invisible under natural light, its progressive release in the atmosphere was made visible through an infrared (IR) camera equipped with a band-pass filter (Pron et al. in J Vis 13:181–182, 2010). By use of this novel method, the visual tracking of the progressive desorption of dissolved CO2 has been carried out, under standard serving conditions, whether champagne was served into a flute or into a coupe.

Thermographic lock-in investigation of thermal interaction between a thermal probe used in scanning thermal microscopy and a thin composite sample is used for estimating the relative fraction of heat flux transferred to the sample by conduction through the air and by direct local contact. The latter is determined by vector subtraction of out-of-contact data from in-contact data, for different modulation frequencies. It represents only 8% of the total modulated heat flux dissipated by the probe, and is frequency-independent. The heat transfer by air conduction varies between 23% and 6% for f = 0.2...40 Hz with a broad equivalent heat source radius of r 0.2 mm.