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
lack these shortcomings. Nevertheless thermal
degradation is constrained by the necessity of high
temperatures, limiting its applicability. In order to better
comprehend the relationship between thermophysical
parameters and tar degradation, thermal cracking of
selected tar compounds was investigated in this research
adopting Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) software
package OpenFOAM.
Figure 1. Selected compounds and their simplified chemical pathways.
II. METHODOLOGY
A 2D tubular reactor with heated walls was considered
to model the tar cracking process. Selection of the model
compounds (Benzene, toluene and naphthalene) of tar, as
shown in Figure 1, was made based on their presence in
tar lumps, stability and overall significance in reaction
Figure 2. Comparison of naphthalene conversion with ref [1], under
temperature range of 1323-1573K and residence time of 0.5 seconds.
pathways. Since sophisticated reaction kinetics are
computationally expensive, a global mechanism was used
within this work. As chemical kinetic modelling is based
Abstract
Figure 3. Naphthalene conversion percentage as a function of
temperature and residence time
on numerical correlations that describe observed
phenomena, room for improvement lies in determining the
most important factors in reaction pathways.
III. DISCUSSION AND RESULTS
As shown in Figure 2, the modelling results were
validated by comparing with the experimental results
reported in literature [1]. Plots describing compound
conversion under a range of temperatures and residence
times are presented. Based on literature [1] indicating the
minimum temperature for thermal cracking a number of
simulations were conducted. Sensitivity analyses based
on the rate of change of conversion as a function of
temperature and residence time (1323-1573K and 0.25
0.5s) show a higher dependence on temperature compared
to residence time, with effects increasing with temperature
(Figure 3). Surfaces were obtained using kriging approach
[2] to estimate the conversion for different values of
temperature and residence time.
IV. CONCLUSIONS
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, benzene reactions are the rate
defining step in the overall model compound cracking
mechanism.
Future work will incorporate a more robust kinetic model
accounting for real operational conditions and further
sensitivy analysis by its respective surrogate model.
REFERENCES
[1] A. Jess, 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