The simulation of hydrogen from biomass and experimental investigation of the effect of catalytic filter on the product gas

Restricted energy sources, increased fuel demand, adverse impacts such as industrialization, environmental problems and climate change, new, high reserve, easy-to-operate, clean and low cost energy sources have become mandatory. Increasing concerns over greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels and the need for a clean fuel with high energies have prompted interest in hydrogen production from biological renewable sources, also known as "bio-hydrogen". Gasification is more preferred in biofuel production as it is efficient and clean among biomass conversion technologies. Gasification is one of the most effective ways of converting the energy hand from fuel sources and the solids into a usable form by partial or complete conversion to gases. Hydrogen is a by-product of the gasification process and will reduce concerns about environmental pollution and emissions when produced from a clean and renewable source such as biomass. Hydrogen energy is a carrier fuel and has the flexibility to be efficiently converted to other energy forms for use in different energy applications such as fuel cells. The main objective of this work is to model the hydrogen-rich synthesis gas production by ASPEN HYSYS simulation program by gasification of various biomass. For this purpose, four different biomass (hazelnut shells, almond shells, corn residues, and tree wastes) were selected with the potential of biomass in our country. The raw synthesis gas composition, from which the gasifier output was obtained in the simulated process, was used as the input stream to the model. The main inlet stream (gasifier outlet) is conditioned at the appropriate temperature in the water gas-shift reactor (WGS), free of tar and unwanted particulates, thus transforming the hydrogene into a rich gas. This hydrogen enriched gas is pressurized to be purified and fed to the pressure swing adsorption (PSA) unit and pure hydrogen is obtained. In this model, H2/CO ratio, steam/CO ratio, WGS reactor temperature, WGS conversion percentage, gas composition resulting from simulation are investigated depending on the freeboard temperature and the amount of water used for conditioning the synthesis gas. In addition, for each model, cold gas production and hydrogen production rate of the system were calculated. The second purpose of the study was to prepare the catalytic filter and experimentally test the performance of this filter in tar removal. As a result of the experiment, changes in gas content were investigated by the conversion of tar and methane. Subsequently, the tar removal process was simulated in the ASPEN HYSYS program using experimental data and the simulation results were compared with the experimental results. As a result of the modeling studies, it was seen that the highest hydrogen production was realized in simulations using tree wastes according to the simulations of hydrogen production with 1,466 kg/h and other biomass. In this simulation study, the hydrogen production rate was calculated as 79% and the cold gas efficiency as 74%. According to the test results the use of almond shell and waste wood was the most effective way to remove tar in the experiment.