6533b7d7fe1ef96bd12679dc

RESEARCH PRODUCT

Numerical and Experimental Investigation of Equivalence Ratio (ER) and Feedstock Particle Size on Birchwood Gasification

Rukshan JayathilakeSouman Rudra

subject

Control and OptimizationBirchwood gasification020209 energycold gas efficiencyEnergy Engineering and Power TechnologyBiomassThermodynamics02 engineering and technologycomputational fluid dynamicsBirchwood gasification; computational fluid dynamics; equivalence ratio; cold gas efficiency; syngaslcsh:Technologyequivalence ratio0202 electrical engineering electronic engineering information engineeringElectrical and Electronic EngineeringEngineering (miscellaneous)Petroleum engineeringRenewable Energy Sustainability and the EnvironmentChemistrylcsh:TProducer gassyngasYield (chemistry)ParticleHeat of combustionParticle sizeMass fractionEnergy (miscellaneous)Syngas

description

This paper discusses the characteristics of Birchwood gasification using the simulated results of a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) model. The CFD model is developed and validated with the experimental results obtained with the fixed bed downdraft gasifier available at the University of Agder (UIA), Norway. In this work, several parameters are examined and given importance, such as producer gas yield, syngas composition, lower heating value (LHV), and cold gas efficiency (CGE) of the syngas. The behavior of the parameters mentioned above is examined by varying the biomass particle size. The diameters of the two biomass particles are 11.5 mm and 9.18 mm. All the parameters investigate within the Equivalences Ratio (ER) range from 0.2 to 0.5. In the simulations, a variable air inflow rate is used to achieve different ER values. For the different biomass particle sizes, CO, CO2, CH4, and H2 mass fractions of the syngas are analyzed along with syngas yield, LHV, and CGE. At an ER value of 0.35, 9.18 mm diameter particle shows average maximum values of 60% of CGE and 2.79 Nm3/h of syngas yield, in turn showing 3.4% and 0.09 Nm3/h improvement in the respective parameters over the 11.5 mm diameter biomass particle.

yearjournalcountryeditionlanguage
2017-08-19
10.3390/en10081232http://hdl.handle.net/11250/2490394