Liquid yield from juniper and mesquite bio‐fuel gasification |
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| Authors: | Wei Chen Siva Sankar Thanapal Kalyan Annamalai R James Ansley |
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| Affiliation: | 1. School of Electric power Engineering, China University of Mining and Technology, Xuzhou, Jiangsu, China;2. Department of Mechanical Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA;3. Texas AgriLife Research, Vernon, TX, USA |
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| Abstract: | Mesquite (Prosopis glandulosa) and redberry juniper (Juniperus pinchotii) are two woody species which dominate uncultivated lands in the south central Great Plains, USA (Texas, Oklahoma) and may have potential for bioenergy utilization. In this study, these two biomasses were gasified in an adiabatic, updraft fixed‐bed gasifier using air as medium. The products include low heating value gas and liquid tar yield. The effects of fuel moisture content and the equivalence ratio (ER) on liquid yields including heavy tar and light tar and higher heating value (HHV) of the producer gas were investigated. It was found that updraft gasifiers produce a large amount of tar, in a range of 100 g/Nm3 of gas produced. As the equivalence ratio (ER) increased (i.e. more rich char conditions), peak temperature (Tpeak) within the bed decreased due to the lesser partial oxidization. The liquid yield showed peak value with change in moisture content between 6 and 24%. Heavy tar is a very high quality fuel with a higher heating value of over 29 MJ/kg on a dry, ash‐free (DAF) basis which is a slightly higher than that of ethanol. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. |
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| Keywords: | tar gasification residence time higher heating value equivalence ratio |
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