Production of hydrogen- and methane-rich gas by stepped pyrolysis of biomass and its utilization in IC engines

Brijesh Kumar Prajapati,Preetam Singh,Shalini Gautam,Amrit Anand

doi:10.1007/s10098-021-02249-y

Abstract

Automobile industries primarily use petroleum-based fuels like petrol and diesel, creating environmental hazards, a high carbon footprint, and severe health issues. The world focuses on compressed natural gas (CNG)-based energy solutions and developing CNG infrastructures to minimize environmental concerns from fossil fuel. The current focus to introduce a fraction of hydrogen with CNG in the existing fuel system is initiated here. Therefore, biomass utilization is taken into account to produce high hydrogen-containing fuel to cut down the carbon footprint and environmental issues. Biomass residues such as sun hemp, pigeon pea, mustard stem, wheat straw, dhaincha, and vantulasi were slowly pyrolyzed in a stepped manner to produce a hydrogen-rich clean fuel. The yield of product gas (hydrogen-rich CNG; HCNG) obtained by the pyrolysis process (21–29%) contains a volumetric composition of 40–55% hydrogen and 10–25% methane balanced with oxides of carbon depending on different biomass feedstocks. This study also focused on utilizing obtained HCNG in IC engine (2KVA Honda Genset) in terms of its running duration and efficiency. The maximum running time observed in sun hemp is 30 min, followed by the mustard stem is 28 min, the lowest in vantulasi is 16 min. However, the highest process efficiency is 87% for dhaincha which is 3.6 times more effective, and the lowest is 74% for Sun hemp, which is 3 times more effective than petrol in Genset for power production. A correlation is developed between ultimate analysis and product gas composition for running time estimation.Graphical abstract

Highlights

Energy is the lifeblood of human society; imagining the world without a continuous supply of energy is impossible; currently, the major portion of energy demand fulfills by fossil fuels
This study is focused on the performance of 2kva HONDA Genset in terms of its running duration when obtained BioHCNG gas is used as fuel and a correlation is developed between H2, CH4, ΔH (Change in Hydrogen wt. % during the process) and D (Duration for which Genset will run in minutes) i.e., D = -6.25 + 0.996ΔH + 0.3889CG for model 1 & D = -9.20 + 0.090ΔH + 0.6099H2 + 0.1893CH4 for model 2
The mustard stem char contains 18.5% of ash and the wheat straw char has 27.25 % ash content, which is higher among all the above samples

Summary

Introduction

Energy is the lifeblood of human society; imagining the world without a continuous supply of energy is impossible; currently, the major portion of energy demand fulfills by fossil fuels. The continuous supply of fossil fuels is becoming a challenge in recent years resulting in a continuous price rise (Edwards et al 2007; Pawar et al 2013). The exhausts resulting from the combustion of these fossil fuels are very dangerous, for human beings and the environment leaving a huge carbon footprint behind (Reşitoʇlu et al 2015). The inter-related problems of energy and the environment are one of the biggest challenges the world is facing today. Energy sustainability and the decreasing carbon footprint is the biggest challenge, that must be attained and rectified in an accelerated way. The thermochemical conversion route is a good solution to use biomass energy in the technical application (Chen et al 2003) and to overcome the environmental pollution due to exhaust of internal combustion (IC) engines and industries, the world is moving towards CNG and HCNG (a mixture of Hydrogen and CNG) (Lang et al 2011; Jiang et al 2012; Abuadala and Dincer 2012)

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