An Experimental Setup to Study the Fundamental Phenomena Associated With Biomass Combustion

During the combustion of solid biomass in a grate-fired boiler, each particle experiences a sequence of processes which include heating, drying, devolatilization, and char combustion. Furthermore, in the gas phase, products may react with oxygen. As it is impossible to maintain repeatable and fully controlled environments, and to monitor all the dynamics involved in field-scale experiments, it becomes necessary to perform investigations at a small scale. This should be sufficient to provide a controlled environment, and large enough to define realistic conditions. In this way, to evaluate the thermal behavior of biomass particles under an oxidative atmosphere and determine the composition of the flue gas released into the atmosphere, a small-scale reactor was developed and presented in this paper. The results of the different mass loss profiles at different combustion conditions and with samples with different size are presented. Additionally, the composition of the gases released over the devolatilization period was determined using a gas chromatograph and they are here correlated with the reactor temperature. This work proved to be very useful since it is important for the computational modeling of industrial boilers and is required for the design and operation of biomass combustion equipment. In the future, this study will be very valuable to develop a computational tool to analyze the combustion process inside an industrial grate-fired boiler.