Performance of Household Rice Husk Downdraft Gasifier in Vietnam: Modeling and experiment

Lack of conventional energy is one of the huge problems that challenge human beings in the next decades. The crude oil might become exhausted in the year 2050 as predicted and harm our environment. Renewable energy development is the effective approach to solve this problem in which biomass has the potential to replace crude oil and fossil fuels. Rice husk is one of the most popular biomass resources in ASEAN countries such as Vietnam, Indonesia, The Philippines, Thailand, Cambodia, and Myanmar, and other Asian countries like India. Gasification of this biomass is the first approach that there have many works conducted. Rice husk can be used to supply heating energy via directly burning or gasification. A study is necessary to see how the effects of some variables on the biomass gasification products and how to predict these products without the experiment. This paper has presented the modeling and investigation of the Vietnamese rice husk downdraft gasifier. An equilibrium modeling was developed to be used to predict the amount of biochar and syngas compositions. The modeling results showed a particularly good agreement with the experimental one. The average root means square error (RMSE) between experimental and modeling results is 1.642; 1.882; 1.445 and 1.345 in reduction temperature are 750oC; 800oC; 850oC and 900oC, respectively. Therefore, the model developed might be useful to predict the syngas composition and the biochar for rice husk gasification