An Ethical and Technical Analysis of Nuclear Energy Production
Type of Submission
Podium Presentation
Campus Venue
Dixon Ministry Center, Room 162
Location
Cedarville, OH
Start Date
4-10-2013 2:00 PM
End Date
4-10-2013 2:20 PM
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Apr 10th, 2:00 PM
Apr 10th, 2:20 PM
An Ethical and Technical Analysis of Nuclear Energy Production
Cedarville, OH
Comments
Abstract:
Facing the ever-growing pressure of global warming as well as high fuel prices, the demand of clean renewable energy is rapidly increasing with a momentum never witnessed before. One of such energy resources is biomass, e.g. wood chips, corn stalks, switchgrass, algae, wastes etc, which can be converted to fuel by biochemical or thermochemical methods. Common thermochemical conversion techniques like gasification and pyrolysis produce hot syngas or bio-oil with a high concentration of char particles in the products (typically 5-10 percent for gasification and 15-20 percent for fast pyrolysis), which should be removed before further refinements are possible. A relatively new method for char particulate removal from high temperature gas stream is the moving bed granular filter (MBGF), which captures char particles by passing the syngas through a bed of granules and reaches steady operation through continuous withdrawal of the filtration media with captured particles. It was found that there exists a critical granular flow rate, under which the operation of the MBGF may fail to reach steady state due to the continuous accumulation of char over time. On the other hand, the MBGF can maintain high filtration efficiency if is running at a granular flow rate above the critical value and in such situations the granular flow rate has no significant effect on the filtration efficiency. This discovery suggests that it is optimum to operate the MBGF at the critical granular flow rate. The current research presents a CFD study of the filtration process in a MBGF. The flow field of the syngas in the MBSF is simulated. The study is accomplished with the aid of commercial CFD software FLUENT and its powerful UDF feature. The mechanism of char accumulation is discussed and the critical granular flow rate is explored.