Utilization of fire dynamics simulator model to study rice husk gasification in fixed-bed gasifier

Abstract

Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) modeling applications of the biomass gasification process help to optimize the gasifier. This study aims to investigate the impact of several physical parameters on the behavior of gasification in a fixed-bed downdraft gasifier. To that end, the study presents a comparison of the results computed using the Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) model with experimental results of biomass gasification. Therefore, different sets of simulations and experiments have been performed to examine the effects of initial moisture content, equivalence ratio, high heating value (HHV), and cold gas efficiency (CGE). At the optimum operation, the equivalence rate is 0.3, the HHV can reach 5.71 MJ/m3, and the produced hydrogen concentration is 26.53 vol%. For an initial moisture content of 11.18%, the measured CGE is 66.85%, which is within the range of 65.07% to 70.44%. In general, the initial moisture content of the rice husks is suggested to be below 18%. The overall results indicate that the FDS model can effectively simulate and analyze gasification performance inside the gasifier, and the performance of an improved downdraft gasifier system (IDGS) is improved by higher cold gas efficiency.