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CO2 gasification behavior of biomass chars in an entrained flow reactor

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Abstract

Chars of different particle sizes (150–250, 500–600 μm) from two different biomass species (spruce and coconut shell) were gasified under entrained flow condition in the presence of CO2 at different temperatures (800, 900 and 1000 °C). The concentration of CO2 was also varied between 5 and 20 % to determine its effect. It was found that significant improvement in gasification efficiency is possible by lowering the particle size below 0.5 mm. This finding was attributed to the spruce char as it showed the highest (≈50 %) conversion for the lowest particle size. It was also revealed that less reactive chars (coconut shell) were insensitive to the particle size and temperature variation for CO2 as a gasifying agent. Generally, pyrolysis process dominates the conversion process during raw biomass gasification. No tar component was observed during gasification at 1000 °C. As a whole, this study provides useful insight about the entrained flow gasification process of biomass chars with CO2.

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Acknowledgments

The research work was carried out at the Department of Chemical Engineering, Monash University. The authors like to acknowledge the financial and technical support for this work from Australian Research Council (ARC) LIEF Grant (LE120100141) and Monash Center for Electron Microscopy (MCEM) respectively.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Division of Energy Science, Department of Engineering Sciences and Mathematics, Luleå University of Technology, SE-97187, Luleå, Sweden

    Kawnish Kirtania

  2. Department of Chemical Engineering, Monash University, Clayton, VIC, 3800, Australia

    Sankar Bhattacharya

Authors
  1. Kawnish Kirtania
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  2. Sankar Bhattacharya
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Correspondence to Kawnish Kirtania.

Electronic supplementary material

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ESM 1

Supporting information for this work contains scanning electron microscopic images of spruce and coconut shell char. The information is available via the internet at (DOCX 828 kb)

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Kirtania, K., Bhattacharya, S. CO2 gasification behavior of biomass chars in an entrained flow reactor. Biomass Conv. Bioref. 6, 49–59 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13399-015-0174-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13399-015-0174-6

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