Research of Production Synthesized Gas from Biomass and Glycerol by Steam Reforming

Using biomass for energy generation is getting increasing attention. At present, gasification of biomass is taken as a popular technical route to produce synthesized gas for application in boiler, engine, gas turbine or fuel cell. In this study, a new approach of steam reforming of biomass and glycerol for synthesized gas production has been primarily investigated in a fixed-bed reactor. The effects of gasifier temperature, pure glycerol/biomass and crude glycerol/biomass ratio on gas composition and yield were investigated. The results show that a higher temperature is not conducive to the synthesized gas production. With the increasing gasifier temperature varying from 650 to 850°C, the synthesized gas yield showed a linear decrease from 66.533 to 57.742%; CO₂ yield was doubled, up to 51.817% and CH₄ decreased from 6.456 to 0.752%. Higher pure glycerol/biomass ratio favors the synthesized gas production. Changes of crude glycerol/biomass ratio have little influence on the synthesized gas production when the ratio less than 20%. From the experimental data, it can be concluded that lower reaction temperature and higher glycerol/biomass favors the synthesized gas production.