Gasification of Sawdust in Bubbling Fluidised Bed Gasifier

The post-modern age has lead to the excessive use of fossil fuels in energy and transportation systems, which contributes to the ever-growing environmental concern. This motivates considerable investigations on alternative energy sources like biomass. The growing uncertainty regarding the use and availability of fossil fuel compounds to the need. For these reasons, the world’s current focus is shifted towards unconventional energy sources. Biomass is a widely recognised energy source which can replace the conventional fuels due to its biodegradable, non-toxic and renewable nature. In addition, reduced environmental pollution along with efficient management of agro wastes contributes to its significance in the present scenario. Among the methods, gasification provides effective conversion of biomass to concentrated form of energy. Mathematical and computational approaches are applied to conduct these studies on biomass gasification due to the extensive range of investigations. In this work various processes associated to gasification of biomass and different techniques for chemical analysis are studied. A mathematical model is developed to predict the producer gas yield and the predicted results are compared with the experimental results. It is observed that hydrogen yield is influenced by temperature and equivalence ratio. A maximum hydrogen yield of 10.83% is obtained during the specified operating conditions of the experiment at temperature of 760 °C and equivalence ratio of 0.26, while the model prediction is 10.3% under the same operating condition.