Inorganic constituents formed during small-scale gasification of poultry litter: A model based study

Abstract

Europe's vast poultry industry requires a proper waste management in order to comply with environmental regulations. As a result, poultry litter represents a potential fuel candidate for thermal conversion technologies since it is an available source. Therefore, a process simulation for the gasification of poultry litter is examined in this study. This process integrates a fluidised bed gasifier with a gas turbine with the aim of generating combustibles gases for energy production. The system allows the treatment of waste with the additional benefit of energy generation. A small-scale system (200 kWe) installed on-site the biomass source shows to be suitable for a poultry farm to avoid the litter transportation to centralised plants. Among the by-products generated during gasification, such as NOx, SO2, and tar, ash represents a potential risk since bed agglomerates can lead to loss of fluidisation and alkali vapours in the product gases can increase rates of hot corrosion on turbine surfaces. This work presents the partition of the most problematic inorganic species in order to assess the feasibility of the system and identify the optimum parameters to minimise the vaporisation of inorganics. It was found that low ER values produced low HCl emissions and good process efficiencies but released very high SO2 emissions.