EXPERIMENTAL AND NUMERICAL STUDY OF MUNICIPAL SOLID WASTE GASIFICATION

Abstract

Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) contains high proportion of hydrocarbon rich biomass that can be recovered as an energy source. Among all the treatment methods, gasification is considered as a clean and efficient way to convert biomass to syngas (mainly CO and H2), which can be further used for chemical synthesis or power generation. In this study, different kinds of solid waste, including woodchips, sewage sludge and horse manure waste were investigated from lab-scale gasifiers to a 20 kW pilot scale reactor. Different pretreatment strategies, such as struvite precipitation for horse manure waste and hydrothermal conversion for sludge were applied according to different feedstock properties. Also, thermal-equilibrium and three-dimensional (3D) CFD models were proposed to simulate and optimize the operation of downdraft biomass gasifiers with good agreements.