With the limited reserves of fossil fuels and the environmental problems associated with their use, the world is moving towards cleaner, renewable, and sustainable sources of energy. Biomass is a promising feedstock towards attaining this goal because it is abundant, renewable, and can be considered as a carbon neutral source of energy. Syngas can be further processed to produce liquid fuels, hydrogen, high value chemicals, or it can be converted to heat and power using turbines. Most of the downstream processing of syngas occurs at high pressures, which requires cost intensive gas compression. It has been considered to be techno-economically advantageous to generate pressurized syngas by performing high-pressure gasification.
Gasification utilizes high temperatures and an oxidizing gas to convert biomass to synthesis gas (syngas, a mixture of CO and H2). Most of the past studies on gasification used process conditions that did not simulate an industrial gasification operation. This work aims at understanding the chemical and physical transformations taking place during high-pressure biomass gasification at heating rates of practical significance. We have adopted an approach of breaking down the gasification process into two steps: 1) Pyrolysis or devolatalization (fast step), and 2) Char gasification (slow step). This approach allows us to understand pyrolysis and char gasification separately and also to study the effect of pyrolysis conditions on the char gasification kinetics. Alkali and alkaline earth metals in biomass are known to catalyze the gasification reaction. This potentially makes biomass feedstock a cheap source of catalyst during coal gasification. This work also explores catalytic interactions in biomass-coal blends during co-gasification of the mixed feeds. The results of this study can be divided into four parts: (a) pyrolysis of loblolly pine; (b) gasification of pine chars; (c) pyrolysis and gasification of switchgrass; (d) co-gasification of pine/switchgrass with lignite and bituminous coals.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:GATECH/oai:smartech.gatech.edu:1853/53917 |
| Date | 21 September 2015 |
| Creators | Newalkar, Gautami |
| Contributors | Sievers, Carsten, Agrawal, Pradeep K. |
| Publisher | Georgia Institute of Technology |
| Source Sets | Georgia Tech Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
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