Available online at www.sciencedirect.com ScienceDirect Materials Today: Proceedings 5 (2018) 23413–23422 www.materialstoday.com/proceedings 2214-7853 © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Selection and Peer-review under responsibility of the Conference Committee Members of International Conference on Advances in Energy Research 2015 (ICAER-2015). ICAER-2015 Tea factory waste as a feedstock for thermo-chemical conversion to biofuel and biomaterial V. Basumatary, R. Saikia, R. Narzari, N. Bordoloi, L. Gogoi, D. Sut, N. Bhuyan, R. Kataki 0F0F* Biofuel Laboratory, Department of Energy, Tezpur University, Tezpur-784028, Assam, India Abstract In the present investigation, tea factory waste, a major agro-industrial waste in tea factory was pyrolysed in a fixed-bed reactor with an aim to study the product distribution and their characterization and to identify the optimum condition for bio-oil yield. The investigated process variables were temperature (400-700ºC) and heating rate (10 and 40ºC/min). Chemical characterization of bio-oil was carried out using FTIR, NMR and GC-MS. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) images of the obtained char was also taken. This investigation showed that the maximum bio-oil yield of 26.80% was obtained at a final temperature of 500°C, with a heating rate of 40°C/min. The heating value of the bio-oil is 29.11 MJ/kg. The study showed that tea factory waste have potential for conversion to bio-oil through the process of pyrolysis to supplement the petro-derived liquid fuel for transportation and the biochar produced can be used to sequester atmospheric carbon dioxide and for soil amendment. © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Selection and Peer-review under responsibility of the Conference Committee Members of International Conference on Advances in Energy Research 2015 (ICAER-2015). Keywords: pyrolysis; tea factory waste; bio-oil; biochar 1. Introduction Tea is one of the major plantation crops and an agricultural export item for countries like India, China, Sri Lanka and Kenya. In addition to cultivation, tea picking and processing have provided job opportunities to millions of * Corresponding author. Tel.: +91 3712 275308; fax: +91 3712 267005/6. E-mail address: rupamkataki@gmail.com