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Environmental and thermodynamic performance assessment of biomass gasification process for hydrogen production in a downdraft gasifier

  • Tayebeh Marzoughi , Fereshteh Samimi and Mohammad Reza Rahimpour EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: July 30, 2021
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Chemical Product and Process Modeling
From the journal Chemical Product and Process Modeling Volume 17 Issue 6

Abstract

Gasification is one of the most efficient techniques for sustainable hydrogen production from biomass. In this study, a comparative performance analysis of the gasification process using various types of biomass materials was undertaken via thermodynamic approach. Air, steam, and air/steam as the traditional gasifying agents were applied to provide an opportunity to choose the most proper agent in the process. This paper also evaluates the environmental impacts of the process in terms of CO2 emission by using Aspen Energy Analyzer. The effects of agent to biomass molar ratio, agent inlet temperature, moisture content of biomass material, and gasification temperature were estimated based on the producer gas compositions, hydrogen yield and heating values. The results indicate that the highest hydrogen yield (0.074 g H2/g biomass) was obtained in the steam gasification of plastic, while air gasification of paper generates the lowest one. It was also observed that manure is the most beneficial from environmental perspectives, while tire and plastic have the highest contribution to CO2 emission and consequently global warming. The higher values of hydrogen production and LHV of produced gas are associated respectively with using steam, air/steam, and air as the gasification agents. The lowest value of CO2 emission is obtained for air, air/steam, and steam as the gasifying agents, respectively.

Keywords: Aspen Plus; biomass gasification; environmental analysis; hydrogen production; performance assessment; thermodynamic model
Corresponding author: Mohammad Reza Rahimpour, Department of Chemical Engineering, School of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering, Shiraz University, Mollasadra Street, Shiraz 71345, Iran, E-mail:

  1. Author contributions: All the authors have accepted responsibility for the entire content of this submitted manuscript and approved submission.

  2. Research funding: None declared.

  3. Conflict of interest statement: The authors declare no conflicts of interest regarding this article.

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Supplementary Material

The online version of this article offers supplementary material (https://doi.org/10.1515/cppm-2021-0029).

Received: 2021-04-10
Accepted: 2021-07-09
Published Online: 2021-07-30

© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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https://doi.org/10.1515/cppm-2021-0029
Keywords for this article
Aspen Plus; biomass gasification; environmental analysis; hydrogen production; performance assessment; thermodynamic model

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Research Articles
  3. CFD simulation of the ethylbenzene dehydrogenation reaction in the fixed bed reactor with a cylindrical catalyst of various sizes
  4. Energy and exergy optimization of oxidative steam reforming of acetone–butanol–ethanol–water mixture as a renewable source for H2 production via thermodynamic modeling
  5. A novel LSSVM-L Hammerstein model structure for system identification and nonlinear model predictive control of CSTR servo and regulatory control
  6. Environmental and thermodynamic performance assessment of biomass gasification process for hydrogen production in a downdraft gasifier
  7. Modeling of lime production process using artificial neural network
  8. Control of TITO processes using sliding mode controller tuned by ITAE minimizing criterion based Nelder-Mead algorithm
  9. To the problem of forming the equation system for pressure swing adsorption mathematical model
  10. Review
  11. A comparative study of various Smith predictor configurations for industrial delay processes
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