Catalytic Gasification of Wood Powder and Lignin with Physical Property Assessment of the Feedstock

This study checks the possibility to use alkali salts as additives for improving biomass gasification by impregnating pulverized pine with salt solutions. The goal is to open up more streams of feedstocks in the production of renewable fuels from gasification. In this case an entrained flow gasifier (Chemrec type) with the ability of recycle alkalis has generated this possibility. Currently, it uses black liquor as feedstock. The biofuel industry has a bottleneck to this feedstock because of its dependence on the paper and pulp industries energy production.The improvements by adding alkali salts to biomass has shown that it is possible to make it at least 5 times as reactive and increase the amount of solid char after pyrolysis with 70% compared untreated pine on ash free basis. The impregnated pine did become as reactive as black liquor at 750°C but falls behind at 900°C here were black liquor 2.5 times as reactive. Of the tested alkali salts it was potassium carbonate and sodium carbonate that gave the most desirable results and benefits of higher impregnations. Therefore it is needed to do more test with higher impregnations then what we used to see if the gap at higher temperatures can be decreased further.Also two different lignin powders provided from Innventia were tested for gasification reactivity. One of these contained high amount of alkali and it performed as the less impregnated pine samples. The other one had been washed and had worse properties then untreated pine.Validerat; 20151017 (global_studentproject_submitter