Università di Genova will participate on May 29th – June 1st, 2011 to ESCAPE 21 , (the 21st European Symposium on Computer Aided Process Engineering) in N. Marmaras, Chalkidiki (Greece) and present the poster “A novel approach to the biomass pyrolysis step and product lumping”, developed by the authors D. Bernocco, P. Greppi, E. Arato in collaboration with Libpf.com

Abstract:

The initial pyrolysis/de-volatilization step is common to all high-temperature gas-phase conversion processes (combustion, gasification and pyrolysis) of carbonaceous solids, because condensed phases do not react directly with the gas phase. The aim of the present work is to introduce a systematic, generic stoichiometric approach to represent a biomass starting material and the repartition of pyrolysis products. The approach transforms the conventional representation of the starting material, into a set of well-defined chemical species while respecting the atom balances. The starting points are the elemental composition of the dry and ash free matter of the biomass and the list of possible chemical species deriving from devolatilization. The algorithm is flexible and can accommodate a different selection of possible products. In the current implementation three product groups with 13 species are taken into account. Since there are infinite ways of splitting the starting material over the 13 components, at least 3 repartition coefficients and 8 atom relevance weights must be specified. The algorithm has been implemented using LIBPF (LIBrary for Process Flowsheeting), a process flow-sheeting and modeling tool arranged as a C++ library.