Fixed bed gasification of dairy biomass with enriched air mixture

Siva Sankar Thanapal, Kalyan Annamalai, John M. Sweeten and Gerardo Gordillo

Applied Energy, 2012, vol. 97, issue C, 525-531

Abstract: Concerns over the depletion of fossil fuels and global warming have increased the need for alternative–renewable energy sources. Biomass is one of the renewable and nonconventional energy sources and it also includes municipal solid wastes and animal wastes. Concentrated animal feeding operations produce large quantity of dairy biomass which might result in land and water pollution if left untreated. Different methods are employed to extract the available energy from the dairy biomass which includes co-firing and gasification. Earlier studies on gasification of dairy manure with different steam fuel ratios resulted in increased production of hydrogen. However, the gas mixture has low heat value due to large amount of diluent nitrogen. In order to enhance gas heat values, dairy biomass was gasified in a medium with enriched oxygen varying from 24% to 28% oxygen on volume basis. The effect of enriched air mixture, equivalence ratio and steam fuel ratio on the performance of fixed bed gasifier was studied. Limited studies were done using a mixture of carbon dioxide and oxygen as the gasification medium in order to explore the possibility of complete separation of CO2 and increase the heating value of gas mixture. The results show that the peak temperature and carbon dioxide production increases with corresponding decrease in carbon monoxide with increase in oxygen concentration in the incoming gasification medium. Higher heating value (HHV) of the gases decreases with increase in equivalence ratio (decrease in oxygen concentration). The gases produced using carbon dioxide and oxygen mixture had a higher HHV when compared to that of air and enriched air gasification.

Keywords: Gasification; Enriched air; Dairy biomass; Higher heating value (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (21)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306261911007781
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:appene:v:97:y:2012:i:c:p:525-531

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/405891/bibliographic
http://www.elsevier. ... 405891/bibliographic

DOI: 10.1016/j.apenergy.2011.11.072

Access Statistics for this article

Applied Energy is currently edited by J. Yan

More articles in Applied Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().