Issue |
Renew. Energy Environ. Sustain.
Volume 7, 2022
|
|
---|---|---|
Article Number | 10 | |
Number of page(s) | 9 | |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1051/rees/2021057 | |
Published online | 14 January 2022 |
Research Article
Design and experimental tests of an Imbert type downdraft gasifier prototype and clean-up system for small-scale biomass-based power generation
Superior de Tecnologia e Gestão de Águeda, Universidade de Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal
* e-mail: mlm@ua.pt
Received:
16
July
2021
Received in final form:
24
November
2021
Accepted:
25
November
2021
This paper addresses the design, development and experimental tests of a prototype of fuel gas generation system based on biomass gasification for small-scale applications, around 5 kW. It comprises the small scale downdraft gasifier and the gas cleaning system aiming to clean-up the producer gas to be used in the upstream Internal Combustion Engine (ICE). The design of the downdraft gasifier prototype follows the methodologies that have been reported on the available literature. However, since these methodologies apply to gasifiers with larger rated powers, the adopted methodology is based on the extrapolation of the main parameters used for larger gasifiers design. For runing the ICE the producer gas requires to have a specific gas composition with an acceptable range of impurities. Therefore, a clean-up system was proposed following three stages: in first instance a hot gas clean-up using a cyclone designed to eliminate particles and compounds; then a heat exchanger was used for cooling the gas to condensate tars and water; finally a cold gas clean-up is performed by filtration using two filter steps: the first one using organic material (biomass) and the second one using a polypropylene cartridge filter. Experimental tests were performed using the developed imbert downdraft gasifier prototype, using pellets as feedstock. The preliminary results allow verifying several drawbacks that will difficult an effective integration of the developed prototype for small scale power generation applications based on ICE using low density feedstock.
© M. Mendonça et al., Published by EDP Sciences, 2022
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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