Main performance analysis of kitchen waste gasification in a small-power horizontal plasma jet reactor

Abstract

Plasma gasification technology has been demonstrated in recent studies as one of the most effective and environmentally friendly methods for solid waste treatment, which could be attractive for resource and energy recovery from kitchen waste. This study focuses on the effects of plasma gasification of kitchen waste replaced by 85% flour and 15% vegetables (Mass Fraction), including dimensionless operation parameters, ER (equivalence ratio), SFR (steam to feedstock ratio) and the gasification efficiency. The Horizontal plasma jet reactor is employed in the experiments. It is found that the influence of the equivalence ratio on syngas can be divided into positive and negative parts. And the steam injection is conducive to improving the yield of syngas, which mainly results from the heterogeneous water gas shift reaction. The optimal experimental parameters can be obtained at ER = 0.095 and SFR = 0.084. Besides, the maximum first and second efficiency of plasma gasification during these cases occurs in SFB = 0.084, accounting for 28.2% and 23.0%, respectively, which needs to study further to get improvement. The XRD and Raman spectra are applied to characterize the residual char, which may illustrate that the degree of graphitization is competing with a high yield of syngas during plasma gasification.