3rd Bioenergy Studies Symposium, Samsun, Türkiye, 20 - 21 Mayıs 2021, cilt.1, sa.1, ss.15-23
In response to increasing energy demands and the inevitable release of greenhouse
gases into the environment, researchers have turned their attention to biomass energy
production. Biomass offers a lot of benefits; however, it has poor calorific value due to
its higher moisture and volatile content. Carbonization can be used to overcome this
disadvantage and produce biomass with a higher carbon content. One of the most
promising thermochemical conversion techniques is gasification. In this study, biochar
from oak wood was gasified in a steam environment using Aspen Plus® simulation. The
downdraft gasifier model was developed under steady-state equilibrium parameters
based on the minimization of Gibbs free energy. As consistent with the literature, H2
was produced higher amount in the steam gasification (55.65%) compared with the air
gasification (17.36%). Parametric analyzes were performed to investigate the influence
of the operating parameters on the composition of the syngas. Results depicted that
the increasing temperature and steam/biochar ratio raised the H2 concentration from
53.21% to 55.72% and 54.50% to 56.84% in syngas respectively. Temperature also
showed positive influence on the LHV of syngas that changed between 19620-19708
kJ/kg. The steam/biochar ratio affected the LHV of syngas negatively thus it decreased
from 20257 to 18777 kJ/kg.