Oil & Gas Research
Open Access

Effect of Equivalence Ratio on the Performance of the Downdraft Gasifier – An Experimental and Modelling Approach

Copyright: © 2020  . This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

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In the present work, experiment and modeling work was carried
out for different Equivalence Ratio (ER) to investigate the
downdraft gasifier performance. A 10kWe atmospheric pressure
downdraft gasifier was used for the experimentation purpose.
Lignite and sawdust briquette (70:30, %wt.) were used as
feedstock. Experiments were carried out with seven different
ER (0.24 to 0.386). Fuel consumption, air consumption, and
gas yield were calculated and found to be in the range of 0.54
kg h-1 to 11.1 kg h-1, 0.59 kg h-1 to 19.5 kg h-1 and 2.27 Nm3
kg-1 to 2.99 Nm3 kg-1, respectively. ER 0.386 was found optimum
with respect to gasifier performance and emission. Lower
Heating Value (LHV) and Cold Gas Efficiency were found to
be 4.91 MJ Nm-3 and 80.03% respectively at optimum ER. Tar
and PM were found in the range of 516 mg Nm-3 to 565.3 mg
Nm-3 and 47.86 mg Nm-3 to 57.29 mg Nm-3 respectively for
different ER. A thermo-equilibrium model was prepared to investigate
the producer gas composition and LHV. Overall Root
Mean Square Errors were found to be 2.69 and 2.58 when the
results from the model were compared with the results of experiments
and literature respectively.

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