Experimental investigation of gasification characteristics of pine powder in an entrained flow gasification reactor

The pine powder gasification was conducted in a bench-scale entrained flow reactor. The influences of temperature,oxygen equivalence ratio and steam/biomass ratio on the composition of the gaseous products, carbon conversion, gas yield, LHV, morphology and composition of solid products were studied. The results show that when the reaction temperature increases gradually, the concentrations of CO and H₂ rise dramatically and the concentrations of CO₂ and CH₄ significantly decrease. The carbon conversion, gas yield, and LHV also improve slightly. With a rise of oxygen equivalence ratio from 0.2 to 0.5, the concentrations of CO and H₂ decrease by over 10%, the concentration of CO₂ increases by 100%, and the carbon conversion reaches to 92.9%. Simultaneously, the gas yield also increases slightly, while the LHV exhibits opposite trends. When the steam/biomass ratio increases from 0 to 0.58, the H₂/CO volume ratio grows gradually from 0.63 to 1.40. At the same time, the carbon conversion, gas yield and LHV first increase slowly then decrease rapidly. The analysis by scanning electron microscopy shows that the solid residue of gasification mainly consists of particles and fiber reunion. With increasing reaction temperature, the shape of particles in the solid residue changes gradually from irregular to spherical, while the higher oxygen equivalence ratio makes the number of pores and slits on particles increase rapidly and leads to the breaking of the particles.