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

Rukshan Jayathilake and Souman Rudra
Additional contact information
Rukshan Jayathilake: Department of Engineering and Sciences, University of Agder, Grimstad 4879, Norway
Souman Rudra: Department of Engineering and Sciences, University of Agder, Grimstad 4879, Norway

Energies, 2017, vol. 10, issue 8, 1-19

Abstract: 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, CO 2 , CH 4 , and H 2 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 Nm 3 /h of syngas yield, in turn showing 3.4% and 0.09 Nm 3 /h improvement in the respective parameters over the 11.5 mm diameter biomass particle.

Keywords: Birchwood gasification; computational fluid dynamics; equivalence ratio; cold gas efficiency; syngas (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/10/8/1232/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/10/8/1232/ (text/html)

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:gam:jeners:v:10:y:2017:i:8:p:1232-:d:108952

Access Statistics for this article

Energies is currently edited by Ms. Agatha Cao

More articles in Energies from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().