Supercritical Water Gasification of Biomass: A Detailed Process Modeling Analysis for a Microalgae Gasification Process

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the energetic behavior as well as the behavior of formed gases, taking into account the inorganic content in the supercritical water gasification (SCWG) of microalgae for different process conditions. Two different salt separation cases and different process conditions including varying inorganic content of microalgae have been studied. In addition, the behavior of inorganic elements has been investigated by means of phase partitioning and compound formation in different process equipment of a conceptual SCWG plant. The results show that the process is thermally more efficient when the reactor temperature is lower and when the dry microalgae concentration in the feed is higher. The increase in the mass fraction of the inorganic content of microalgae enhances the formation of CH 4 and H 2 and decreases the thermal energy requirement of the reactor.

Gasifier, Solid Oxide Fuel Cell Integrated Systems for Energy Production From Wet Biomass

“…Some kinetic parameters and reaction pathways are summarized by Yakaboylu et al (2015c). According to the results obtained from a kinetic model, higher residence time increases the CGE (Yakaboylu et al, 2015d).…”

“…This gives limited reported data regarding the gas composition and CGE, in particular when the SCWG operates in continuous reactors with real biomass at higher than 10 wt.%. According to the kinetic results of Yakaboylu et al (2015d), the hydrothermal decomposition of biomass constituents (cellulose, hemicellulose, lignin, and protein) representing manure at 10 wt.% dry biomass gives a CGE of 50%, the reactor residence time is 60 s at 500 • C, 25 MPa. Kinetic models in the catalytic SCWG of glucose, gives a CGE variation from 80 to 100%, the feed biomass fraction is 5-35 wt.% (Tushar et al, 2015).…”

The BioSCWG Project: Understanding the Trade-Offs in the Process and Thermal Design of Hydrogen and Synthetic Natural Gas Production

“…However, it is worthwhile to mention that this presents another design tradeoff with regards to product hydrogen partitioning. The more recent published work of Yakaboylu et al [46] was also based on the envisaged design by Feng et al [25], albeit a more comprehensive multi-phase modelling approach investigated the influence of elemental salts and their inorganic compounds on the design of product extraction steps.…”

“…On a more conservative interpretation of the model findings, the thermo-chemical processing limit for chemical fuel production could be estimated. Similar approaches have been adapted in literature and were also validated with other available experimental data sets for a wide variety of biomass [31,35,36,46].…”

Enhanced thermal destruction of toxic microalgal biomass by using CO2

“…Among various disposal options (i.e., anaerobic digestion, landfilling, and so on) (Lin et al, 2007;Passos et al, 2014;Passos et al, 2015) for collected microalgal biomass, the thermo-chemical process (i.e., incineration, pyrolysis, and gasification) (Conesa and Domene, 2015;Liu and Ma, 2008;Yakaboylu et al, 2015) would be the most feasible option due to significant volume reduction and thermal destruction of toxic materials such as MC-LR. Furthermore, energy recovery via the thermo-chemical treatment of microalgal biomass is possible.…”