Model development and thermodynamic analysis of biomass co-gasification using Aspen plus®

ABSTRACT

Gasification is the process of producing syngas with acceptable heat value from a feedstock. Co-gasifying biomass and using syngas thus produced reduce the net CO₂ emission as biomass is effectively CO₂ neutral. An Aspen plus® model for co-gasification of Indian lignocellulosic biomass is developed and validated against available experimental results. Performance of co-gasification as obtained from this developed model is also assessed by energy and exergy efficiencies of the process. Variations of these two efficiencies with gasification parameters are also reported. Results show that best performance of gasification may be obtained for rice straw with sugarcane bagasse energetically and wheat straw with sugarcane bagasse exergetically. The methodology and results may help selecting Indian biomass for co-gasification with further experimental investigations to decide the suitable one(s).

GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT

KEYWORDS:

• Lignocellulosic biomass
• co-gasification
• Aspen plus®
• energy efficiency
• exergy efficiency

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge DST, India for supporting the work through the INNO-Indigo Project, CONVER-B (Sanction Ref. DST/IMRCD/INNO-INDIGO/CONVER-B/2017(G) DATED January 29, 2018, and DST/IMRCD/INNO-INDIGO/CONVER-B/2017(C) DATED April 11, 2018) and RUSA 2.0. The first author acknowledges Prof. Ranjana Chowdhury, Chemical Engineering, Jadavpur University for guiding the research work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The authors acknowledge DST, India for the funding of INNO-Indigo Project, CONVER-B (Sanction Ref. DST/IMRCD/INNO-INDIGO/CONVER-B/2017(G) DATED January 29, 2018, and DST/IMRCD/INNO-INDIGO/CONVER-B/2017(C) DATED April 11, 2018) and RUSA 2.0.