5th UKJEEL Glasgow 2017 Workshop
Kinetic investigation on thermal tar cracking
during biomass gasification process
D.A. Buentello Montoya*, X. Zhang* & S.P. Marques*
*School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Queens University Belfast, United Kingdom
e-mail: xiaolei.zhang@qub.ac.uk
Keywords: Tar, cracking, openfoam, kinetics, kriging
I. INTRODUCTION
The presence of tars within the biomass gasification
process will damage the downstream equipment, therefore
it is a critical issue to be addressed. Different tar removal
strategies have been proposed, namely chemical, physical
and thermal technologies. For industrial scale
applications, chemical and physical processes are
complicated since they either need the utilisation of
catalysts or produce waste, whereas thermal technologies
have shown promise without these shortcomings.
Nevertheless thermal degradation is constrained by the
necessity of high temperatures, limiting its applicability.
Further development is needed for its industrial scale
usage. In order to better comprehend the relationship
between thermophysical parameters and tar degradation,
thermal cracking of selected tar compounds (naphthalene,
toluene and benzene) was investigated adopting CFD
(OpenFOAM).
Figure 1. Tar model compounds and simplified chemical pathways.
II. METHODOLOGY
A 2D tubular reactor with heated walls was considered
to model the tar cracking process. The modelling results
were validated by comparing with the experimental results
Figure 2. Comparison of naphthalene conversion under a range of
temperatures, 0.5 seconds residence time with reference [1].
Abstract
Figure 3. Naphthalene conversion percentage as a function of
temperature and residence time
reported in literature [1]. Selection of the model
compounds of tar was made based on their presence in tar
lumps, stability and overall significance in reaction
pathways. Since sophisticated reaction kinetics are
computationally expensive, a global mechanism was used
within this work. As chemical kinetic modelling is based
on numerical correlations that describe observed
phenomena, room for improvement lies in determining the
most important factors in reaction pathways. Plots
describing compound conversion under a range of
temperatures and residence times are presented.
Sensitivity analyses for temperature and residence time
time (1273-1573K and 0.25 0.5s) show a higher
dependence on temperature compared to residence time,
with effects increasing with temperature. Surfaces were
obtained using a kriging response surface [2] to estimate
the conversion for different values of temperature and
residence time. Results indicate that for example, over
90% naphthalene can be converted at 1550K with
residence times as short as 0.25 seconds. Furthermore, the
effect of temperature is more pronounced for the cracking
of benzene, rather than that of naphthalene and toluene,
indicating its importance in the overall reaction
mechanism. Therefore, as determined by sensitivities and
conversion, benzene reactions are the rate defining step in
the overall model compound cracking mechanism.
Future work will incorporate a more realistic kinetic as
well as further analysis on the sensitivies from the
respective surrogate model.
REFERENCES
[1] A. Jess, Mechanisms and kinetics of thermal reactions of
aromatic hydrocarbons from pyrolysis of solid fuels, Fuel, vol. 15,
pp. 1441-1448, 1996.
[2] S.N. Lophaven; H.B. Nielsen; J. Sndergaard, DACE, A
MATLAB Kriging Toolbox, Informatics and Mathematical
Modelling, Technical Report IMM-TR-2002-1