Characterization of a pressurized feeder for biomass injection into gas-solid systems

Injection of biomass powders into multiphase reactors is a challenging task that may impact the process yield and limit the operation due to the feeder’s blockage or unstable flow. A horizontal pressurized gas-solid feeder is characterized in this study to inject a batch of biomass powders of different diameters into cold-flow model operating under single phase, and multiphase fixed and fluidized regimes. The gas-solid hydrodynamics in the injection line is investigated for different operating conditions, using a fast camera with acquisition rate of 3000 images/s. Stable injections are performed in a wide range of solids fluxes, and under different solid concentration flow conditions. The operation map for the feeder is produced, and the phenomena that produce difficulty of stable injection are discussed. Ultimately, this type of solids injector is useful for feeding powders into lab-scale reactors for mixing and kinetic studies and might be also scaled-up for treating waste biomass powders into pilot-to-industrial scale reactors under batch or semi-continuous operations