CO2 gasification of coal cokes using internally circulating fluidized bed reactor by concentrated Xe-light irradiation for solar gasification

For the solar thermochemical gasification of coal coke to produce CO + H2 synthetic gas using concentrated solar radiation, a windowed reactor prototype is tested and demonstrated at laboratory scale for CO2 gasification of coal coke using concentrated Xe light from a 3-kWth sun simulator. The reactor was designed to be combined with a solar reflective tower or beam-down optics. The results for gasification performance (CO production rate, carbon conversion, and light-to-chemical efficiency) are shown for various CO2 flow rates and ratios. A kinetics analysis based on homogeneous and shrinking core models and the temperature distributions of the prototype particle bed are compared with those for a conventional fluidized bed reactor tested under the same Xe light irradiation and CO2 flow-rate conditions. The effectiveness and potential impacts of internally circulating fluidized bed reactors for enhancing gasification performance levels and inducing consistently higher bed temperatures are discussed in this paper.