Gasification of Agro-Industrial Wastes for Electricity Cogeneration

The purpose of this paper is to report studies on agricultural residual biomass gasification to power cogeneration. The classification was determined by availability and feedstock for thermochemical conversion of waste materials of flower industry in Colombia. Firstly, it was made an inventory of the main species of flowers produced, they were evaluated from the point of view of energy proximate and ultimate analysis of the available biomass[1]–[4] [5].As a result of this work, the waste types with higher residual biomass per unit area were classified, they generate on average 665.59 Kg/ha of dry residual biomass. The elemental analysis (CHON) was expressed to be: C:35,47%, H:4,50%, O:52,24 % and N:2,291% and a calorific value of 3248,30 cal/kg. Experimental tests were conducted in a gasification updraft reactor using air as gasifying agent, steam and a mixture of air and steam at 850°C. The yields and gas composition were analyzed, in this case the values of CO, H2, CO2, N2 and CH4 have been on average 21.9%, 44.8%, 24.4%, 5.9% and 3.1% respectively [1], [2], [4], [6]–[10]. With the experimental test data was fed zero dimensional model in Aspen Plus® software, which highlights that 20% of energy from biomass producer gas is carried to later becoming electricity, it concludes that for each kilogram of biomass with 11% humidity fed to the process will provide 0.66 kW of electric power to the motor generator.Copyright © 2015 by ASME