Non-Thermal Air Arc Plasma Assisted Biomass Gasification

Abstract

A novel small-scale biomass gasification system assisted by a non-thermal air arc plasma is introduced in this paper and the gasification experiment setup, procedure and gasification results are described in detail. The results show that the production of syngas (CO and H2) is in the range of 1.14 Nm3/h to 1.46 Nm3/h during the system normal operation at plasma power consumption 120 W and biomass feed rate 3360 g/h, and the volume fraction of syngas in produced gas is in the range of 20.2% to 23.89%. The maximum cold gasification efficiency is 44.56% and the minimum specific energy consumption (defined as the ratio of plasma power consumption to the heat power content of the produced gas) of the gasification system is 2.18%, which is much lower than that of gasification system with thermal plasma.