(472g) Dynamic Characteristics Investigation and Control of Tubular Reactor with Supercritical Water Gasification

Hydrogen energy is an important source of energy that cannot be obtained directly from nature [1]. Supercritical water gasification (SCWG) technology is a potential clean and efficient technology to convert biomass waste to hydrogen rich gas, which has received increasing attention in recent years, for example, the research works on gasification performance of different feedstocks, gasification mechanism, catalyst study and reactor design [2, 3, 4]. With regards to the reactor design, dynamic performance of continuous reactors such as tubular reactor and fluidized bed reactor is a research area that is of great importance for the implementation of this technology in industry. The existing works on reactor dynamic performance mainly focused on normal operating condition [5]; however, the dynamic characteristic of supercritical water gasification reactor could be different from the reactor under normal operating conditions due to unique properties of supercritical water.

To address the above issue, supercritical water gasification experiment of biomass will be first conducted in this work to obtain gasification mechanism and detailed reaction pathway. Then the kinetic model of biomass gasification in supercritical water will be developed based on the experimental results accounting for the reaction pathway. To evaluate the performance of reactor and kinetic model, kinetic data in literature will be adopted in this reactor, and the obtained results will be compared with simulation results. Additionally, sensitivity analysis of reactor will be carried out to identity the parameters that greatly influence the gasification results. Dynamic characteristic of reactor such as the response of key output parameters including hydrogen mole fraction and temperature to the perturbation of various parameters such as flowrate will be analyzed based on the sensitivity analysis. Finally, a data-driven based model predictive control system will be developed to improve the dynamic performance of the reactor.

References:

[1] P.P. Edwards, V. Kuznetsov, W.I. David. Hydrogen energy. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences. 365 (2007) 1043-56.

[2] K. Babaei, A. Bozorg, A. Tavasoli. Hydrogen-rich gas production through supercritical water gasification of chicken manure over activated carbon/ceria-based nickel catalysts. Journal of Analytical and Applied Pyrolysis. 159 (2021) 105318.

[3] C.R. Correa, A. Kruse. Supercritical water gasification of biomass for hydrogen production Review. Journal of Supercritical Fluids. 133 (2018) 573-90.

[4] J. Chen, Y. Fan, X. Zhao, E. Jiaqiang, W. Xu, F. Zhang, et al. Experimental investigation on gasification characteristic of food waste using supercritical water for combustible gas production: Exploring the way to complete gasification. Fuel. 263 (2020) 116735.

[5] H.-H. Lee, J.-C. Lee, Y.-J. Joo, M. Oh, C.-H. Lee. Dynamic modeling of Shell entrained flow gasifier in an integrated gasification combined cycle process. Applied energy. 131 (2014) 425-40.