A Catalytic Tar Reduction Methodology Gaseous Fuels

Abstract

The exploitation of fossil fuels has led to the emerging of gaseous fuel for the automobile engines. The researchers are in the search of producer gas from forest woods. In the process of bio gasification, tar is the major obstacle to produce high efficiency gaseous fuel. In this research work, a catalytic tar mitigation process is framed with nickel (Ni) based catalyst. The Ni based nano Si and Ti catalysts are synthesized using deposition-precipitation method. The synthesized Ni-Si and Ni-Ti catalysts are characterized using scanning electron microscope (SEM) and transmission electron microscope(TEM). The surface area and pore volume are calculated by Brunauer-Emmett-Teller and Barrett-Joyner- Halenda methods to justify the catalytic active surface. A design of experiments (DoE) is framed with L12 design table for the 2 level factors (catalyst, catalyst weight, bed temperature and gas feed rate) for the tar concentration response. The signal to noise (SN) ratio and mean of the factors are analysed to identify the significance. As the outcome of the statistical analysis, it is concluded that the minimum tar concentration of 0.47(mg/Nm3) is attained for the 10% of Ni-Si catalyst with the bed temperature of 800ï‚°C and gas feed rate of 0.01 l/s.