Climate change, global warming, and energy crisis are critical issues to be solved urgently in a global framework. Alternative energy and renewable energy technologies must be quickly developed to be substituted for fossil fuels like oil, gases, and coal. USA, UE, and Japan invested huge budgets to develop biomass renewable energy technology. Their target is to develop a commercial base large-scaled plant. On the other hand, in developing countries, especially in rural areas, people who can access electricity is still less than 70%, To decelerate or prevent global warming and improve electrification in rural areas, a new technology for wood pyrolysis, which requires low manufacturing cost and less maintenance, and of which gases are directly applicable to the gas engine generator, is developed in a laboratory scale. This paper reports the performance of this new plant and effects of several parameters on the performance. It is concluded that the new technology is quite feasible in rural areas, and upgrading of the plant is easily possible.

In the previous experimental work, a new technology system for wood pyrolysis was developed to aim at mitigating climate change, global warming, and energy crisis as well as enhancing low electrification in rural areas in developing countries. The new technology system equipped with a pre-vacuum chamber requires low cost and less maintenance. However, large wood pyrolysis in the pre-vacuum chamber is rather complicated. To obtain a good understanding of the previous experimental results, a numerical analysis taking account of heat-mass transfer and chemical reaction is carried out. Two-step general reaction model is proposed for the numerical analysis. The first stage is volatile and char formation from the wood pieces and the second state is decomposition of the volatile to five species including vapor of tar. In this analysis, chemical formulae of the volatile and the tar are successfully identified hypothetically. The results obtained by this numerical analysis can explain the experimental results reasonably and provide useful information about time evolution of volatile formation, temperature change in pre-vacuum chamber with time, and species mole concentration decomposed from the volatile.

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