Reaction kinetics and producer gas compositions of steam gasification of coal and biomass blend chars, part 2: Mathematical modelling and model validation

In gasification of biomass, coal and blended biomass and coal, there are two steps including an initial pyrolysis process followed by gasification of solid char. The latter process is a slow process and thus dominates the whole gasification. In our previous paper (Xu et al., in press), the differences between steam gasification of biomass chars and that of coal chars have experimentally been investigated and the results show that these differences are mainly due to the difference in microstructures of these two fuels. In this work, a mathematical model of char gasification is developed based on reaction kinetics and gas transportation of both the producer gas and the gasification agent (steam). The model also includes mass conservation equations for each of the gas components and solid carbon involved in the gasification process. This has resulted in a set of highly nonlinear differential equations which have been solved using a numerical technique to predict gas production rate, gas compositions and carbon consumption rate during the gasification. The developed mathematical model is validated using experimental results reported in previous paper (Xu et al., in press), and close agreement between the simulation results and the experimental values have been observed. From the modelling, it has been confirmed that the char gasification is mainly determined by the characteristics of char matrix including the exposed surface area and the micro-pore size. The former determines intrinsic reaction rate and the latter influences the intra-particle mass transportation. Biomass char has more amorphous structure, thus the intrinsic reaction rate is enhanced. For coal char, the larger pore size enables the high transport rate of the gasification agent (water vapour) into the char particles but the resultant gases have higher resistance to transfer through compact clusters. For simulation of the blended biomass and coal, the blend properties were determined based on the blend proportion of each fuel. The close agreement between the simulation results and experimental data suggests that the approach in this work can adequately quantify the gasification kinetics and the gas composition.