Simulation and Experimental Investigation of A Multifeed Biomass Gasifier

Abstract

Escalating energy demand and generation of wastes in every sector thirst sustainable technologies for processing the combustible wastes from industry, forestry and agricultural activities into a biofuel. In India, biomass contributes 32% of all the primary energy use as well as 80% of the country edible oil demand is being met by foreign import. For reducing this foreign trade-in, India has recently planned to support for oil palm industry development under National Mission on Oil seeds and Oil palm (NMOOP) program. newlineThe main objective of this study is to develop sustainable resources at regional level by promoting the wastes generated from agriculture and food product industries as fuel feedstock through co-combustion and co-gasification mechanisms for the continuous operation of biomass power plants around the year. In this research, two categories of biomass and coal were considered as fuel feed materials. The biomass feed includes non-edible de-oiled seed cakes of jatropha, pongamia and castor, agro wastes of coconut and palm kernel shells, the coal includes low grade Indian lignite coal and imported bituminous type. Based on the source of generation as well as characterization of these materials by proximate, ultimate and thermogravimetric analyses (TGA), the biomass jatropha seed cake (JC) and palm kernel shells (PKS) were preferred for single feed gasification and co-gasification with coal and other biomass materials. The gasification and co-gasification studies includes the analysis of thermal behavior and kinetics by TGA experiments performed in lab scale one kW downdraft type biomass gasifier with the analysis of syngas production by gas chromatography analyzer. newlineThe TGA analysis at the heating rate of 30oC/min for JC resulted with reaction parameters of 50.87% mass conversion with DTGmax of -11.40%./min at the peak temperature of 347oC. The obtained kinetic parameters such as activation energy (Ea) and frequency factor (A) were 51.24kJ/mol and 2.70×103 (min-1).