Abstract
This paper addresses the solar thermochemical conversion of biomass or waste feedstocks based on pyro-gasification for the clean production of high-value and energy-intensive fuels. The utilization of solar energy for supplying the required process heat is attractive to lower the dependence of gasification processes on conventional energy resources and to reduce emissions of CO2 and other pollutants for the production of high-value chemical synthetic fuels (syngas). Using concentrated solar energy to drive the endothermal reactions further allows producing more syngas with a higher gas quality, since it has not been contaminated by combustion products, while saving biomass resources. The solar-driven process is thus a sustainable and promising alternative route, enabling syngas yield enhancement and CO2 mitigation, thereby potentially outperforming the performance of conventional processes for syngas production. This review presents relevant research studies in the field and provides the scientific/technical knowledge and background necessary to address the different aspects of the solar gasification process. An overview of the available solar concentrating technologies and their performance metrics is first introduced. The solar gasifier concepts and designs that were studied from lab to industrial scale are presented, along with their main benefits and limitations. The different management strategies proposed to deal with solar energy variations are also outlined, as well as the major pilot-scale applications and large-scale system level simulations. A specific emphasis is provided on the spouted bed technology that appears promising for the gasification process. Finally, the main modeling approaches of pyro-gasification and kinetics for simulation of gasifiers are described. This study thus provides a detailed overview of the efforts made to enhance the thermochemical performance of solar-assisted biomass gasification for synthetic fuel production.
Highlights
Gasification reactors have been developed and commercially deployed on the market for more than a century, with current applications in chemicals, liquid fuels, and power generation
This work reported a detailed review of the production of solar fuels from pyrogasification of biomass
It first reviewed the existing background on concentrated solar energy, solar concentrating technologies, and usual performance metrics, and recalled earlier studies covering the topic of solar gasification of biomass
Summary
Gasification reactors have been developed and commercially deployed on the market for more than a century, with current applications in chemicals, liquid fuels, and power generation Such industrial reactors rely on partial combustion of the injected feedstock to deliver the necessary energy required to activate and carry out the strongly endothermic gasification reactions. All the biomass resource can be converted into a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide (syngas), since high-temperature solar heat is advantageously exploited to provide the gasification reaction enthalpy This is due to the fact that all the required energy for reactions is supplied by solar energy; the burning of part of the feedstock can be avoided, which saves resources and avoids products’ contamination with combustion by-products. Solardriven gasification promotes the utilization of biomass while it is an efficient way to store intermittent solar energy in the form of renewable, dispatchable, and storable solar fuels
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