Biomass Pyrolysis and Gasification of Varying Equivalence Ratio in a Lab-scale Updraft Gasifier

摘要

Biomass energy received a great deal of interest lately because of the potential advantage of this renewable energy source in terms of fossil fuel displacement and greenhouse emission. There are a variety of conversion technologies being considered for the production of fuels, including biological disassembly and fermentation, pyrolysis, and gasification. We are interested in the producer gas produced from pyrolysis and gasification process. The University of Iowa Power Plant has been using oat hulls to generate 9 million kw-hours power from the year 2003 and it was a big success. In 2011, a pilot-scale gasifier has been installed to study the biomass gasification characteristics. This gives us the motivation of understanding the fundamentals of gasification process. In previous study, we have tested biomass producer gas evolution for different materials in a lab-scale gasifier. It was found that CO and C02 production for different equivalence ratio show different characteristics. Therefore, further study of equivalence raio's influence on instantaneous gas production and gas composition at different time point has been done. Materials including corn, wood and paper sludge have been tested. The gas compositions for different biomass fuels are different at the same time point using a microGC.