Wood Pyrolysis Using Aspen Plus Simulation and Industrially Applicable Model

Abstract

Over the past decades, a great deal of experimental work has been carried out on the development of pyrolysis processes for wood and waste materials. Pyrolysis is an important phenomenon in thermal treatment of wood, therefore, the successful modelling of pyrolysis to predict the rate of volatile evolution is also of great importance. Pyrolysis experiments of waste spruce sawdust were carried out. During the experiment, gaseous products were analysed to determine a change in the gas composition with increasing temperature. Furthermore, the model of pyrolysis was created using Aspen Plus software. Aspects of pyrolysis are discussed with a description of how various temperatures affect the overall reaction rate and the yield of volatile components. The pyrolysis Aspen plus model was compared with the experimental data. It was discovered that the Aspen Plus model, being used by several authors, is not good enough for pyrolysis process description, but it can be used for gasification modelling.

The multi-scale challenges of biomass fast pyrolysis and bio-oil upgrading: Review of the state of art and future research directions

“…AspenTech ® modules such as Aspen Plus ® or Aspen HYSYS ® were proved to be efficient for process flowsheeting and ensuring plant-wide mass and energy balances [31,35,509,537,538]. The rich library of these tools allows modeling of different catalytic/non-catalytic reactors with different feedstocks [34,[539][540][541][542][543][544][545][546][547][548].…”

Recent Modeling Approaches to Biomass Pyrolysis: A Review

“…For the pyrolytic reactions involving single phase or concurrent phase and chemical equilibrium calculations, RGIBBS solves the model by minimizing Gibbs free energy. Recently, several researchers have adopted the comprehensive modeling method for the simulation study of biomass pyrolysis. − …”

“…However, the consistency of the simulated gas volume fractions with the actual changing trend of biomass pyrolysis gas yield validated the pyrolysis model. Lestinksy and Palit 234 did experiments and modeling studies using waste spruce sawdust to analyze the pyrolyzing gas constituents' yield and change in their composition with an increase in temperature. The model was developed using the ASPEN Plus simulation tool.…”

A kinetic reaction model for biomass pyrolysis processes in Aspen Plus

“…To avoid this drawback, a flexible and predictive simulation capable of dealing with a wide range of different lignocellulosic feedstock is of considerable interest. Kinetic reaction models based on thermodynamic equilibrium calculations can provide this flexibility and have been developed for combustion or gasification reactions [15][16][17], but proven to be unsuitable for predicting pyrolysis reactions [18]. Current approaches for modelling pyrolysis processes focus strongly on computational fluid dynamic (CFD) [19][20][21] or single particle models [22,23], while others consider isolated biomass components (like e.g.…”