The effect of fuel composition on gasification process performance was investigated by performing mass and energy balances on a pre-pilot scale bubbling fluidized bed reactor fed with mixtures of plastic waste, wood, and coal. The fuels containing plastic waste produced less H
2, CO, and CO
2 and more light hydrocarbons than the fuels including biomass. The lower heating value (LHV) progressively increased from 5.1 to 7.9 MJ/Nm
3 when the plastic waste fraction was moved from 0% to 100%. Higher carbonaceous fines production was associated with the fuel containing a large fraction of coal (60%), producing 87.5 g/kg
Fuel compared to only 1.0 g/kg
Fuel obtained during the gasification test with just plastic waste. Conversely, plastic waste gasification produced the highest tar yield, 161.9 g/kg
Fuel, while woody biomass generated only 13.4 g/kg
Fuel. Wood gasification showed a carbon conversion efficiency (CCE) of 0.93, while the tests with two fuels containing coal showed lowest CCE values (0.78 and 0.70, respectively). Plastic waste and wood gasification presented similar cold gas efficiency (CGE) values (0.75 and 0.76, respectively), while that obtained during the co-gasification tests varied from 0.53 to 0.73.
View Full-Text
►▼
Show Figures
This is an open access article distributed under the
Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.