Evaluating the Sensitivity of Biomass Feedstocks to Producer Gas Composition Using Stoichiometric Equilibrium Model

Abstract

Biomass gasification is an attractive renewable energy technology for obtaining producer gas which has many potential applications as compared to the biomass feedstock itself. Although the literatures are available on experimental study of biomass feedstocks on gasification process, a few attempts have been made to evaluate the variation in producer gas composition due to change in biomass feedstocks. Further, equilibrium simulation is a quick and less expensive approach to study the present case. A stoichiometric equilibrium model was formulated using MATLAB to obtain the solution for producer gas constituents. In this study, six different biomass feedstocks were carefully chosen to evaluate their behavior in a gasification process. The results showed that the combustible constituents in the producer gas were found to be maximum for sawdust and minimum for rice straw with bagasse, cotton stalk, wheat straw, and garden waste lying in between. Also, at gasification temperature of 800 °C and above, garden waste and rice straw resulted in poor quality producer gas (<4 MJ Nm−3). In short, a comparative analysis of six different biomass feedstocks on the basis of simulated producer gas composition has been done in this study.