ABSTRACT

Fluidization is a favorable technology for thermochemical processing of biomass materials due to its inherent advantages such as flexibility to process fuels having a wide range of physical and chemical properties. In this study, fluidization characteristics are investigated and minimum fluidization velocities are determined for four different types of biomass (rice husk, sawdust, olive cake and hazelnut shell)- silica sand mixtures in a laboratory scale fluidized bed. Generally, except olive cake, pure sawdust, hazelnut shell, rice husk show poor fluidization characteristics with large gas voids. Mixing the biomass with silica sand result in an improvement in fluidization behavior with significant decrease in minimum fluidization velocity compared to pure biomass case. No single available empirical correlation in the literature is able to predict the minimum fluidization velocities of all types of biomass-silica sand mixtures investigated