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Manipal Journal of Science and Technology

Abstract

Raw biomass could be converted into valuable chemicals or other high-value gases with biomass gasification technique. Considering the complexity resulting from many chemical reactions involved, it is necessary to model the gasification process. The analytical, numerical, and experimental method has been performed to build a comparative analysis in this research. The effect of temperature from biomass gasification design and operating parameters varied against the gasifier’s performance (syngas mass fraction, efficiency, and syngas calorific value). The analytical method was performed with a thermodynamic equilibrium model to assess the performance of the biomass gasifier. Global gasification reaction using zero-dimensional model approach was solved with Newton Raphson method and fsolve in MATLAB. A numerical method was executed with STAR CCM+ Computational Fluid Dynamic simulation software. Complicated gasification reactions could be simulated based on the solutions for many simultaneous stages of equations, like conservation of mass, momentum, energy, also heterogeneous and homogeneous chemical reactions. An experimental method was carried out using the simplest design of the downdraft gasification reactor. The results from the experimental method were applied to validate the analytical and numerical methods obtained previously. Analysis of Root Mean Square Error performs a good agreement with another research published earlier. The optimal operation parameter was gasification temperature 800–900℃, moisture content below 20% and equivalence ratio (ratio between actual air-fuel ratio and stoichiometric air-fuel ratio) of 0.35. Gasification performance is syngas calorific value 5.69 MJ/m3, efficiency 73.71% while syngas mass fraction is 17.5% H2, 21.3% CO, 13.3% CH4, 3.1% CO2, and 44.2% N2.

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