From municipal solid waste (MSW) to hydrogen: Performance optimization of a fixed bed gasifier using Box-Benkhen method

Abstract

Management of solid waste, generated from the municipal/urban sectors has always been troublesome to the governing authorities, especially of the developing and wide populated nations. Traditionally, the municipal solid waste (MSW) is dumped in low land areas for land-filling purpose or burnt in improper way which causes environmental pollution in short term as well as in long term basis. It is experienced that production from green fuel like hydrogen (H2) from MSW through gasification route will not only mitigate the MSW management issues but also reduce the dependency on fossil fuels. In this study, model development of a fixed bed gasifier considering steam gasification method is carried out for production of H2 rich syngas from MSW. Additionally, optimization study by employing Box-Benkhen method of Response Surface Methodology (RSM) is performed to find out the best values output parameters viz., H2 yield, lower heating value (LHV) of syngas and cold gas efficiency (CGE). It is noted that modelled gas data matches well with the experimental gas data. It is also imparted from the optimization analysis that the model offers H2 yield of about 64% with LHV of the syngas of about 11 MJ/kg and cold gas efficiency of about 92%, respectively. Desirability of the model predicted results are computed to be ‘0.79’ which signifies that results are substantially accurate and well acceptable.