A numerical study of the urban wood waste gasification

Abstract

Biomass gasification is currently considered a promising technology with regard to the sustainable use of bioenergy to produce power due to its renewable character and relative availability. In this work, an Eulerian model was used to study numerically the behavior of the temperature and velocity fields, as well as the mass fraction of H2O and wood inside of a gasifier under specific conditions. Two-dimensional simulations were carried out, with the software Ansys Fluent, for turbulent flows with different velocities and temperatures imposed on the entrances of the gasifier. Furthermore, the influence of the viscosity on the temperature and velocity fields was also studied. The results reveal that the maximum temperature inside the gasifier increases slightly with the inlet velocity and the turbulence viscosity ratio is lower in the zones with higher velocity. For the inlet temperature of 300 K, the temperature at the center of the gasifier between the two inlets decreases from 647 K to 612 K as the inlet velocity increases from 0.2 to 0.6 m/s.

Keywords

• Gasification
• CFD
• Eulerian approximation
• k-Epsilon turbulent model