1 MW Scale-up of the Advanced Fuel Flexible Dual Fluidized Bed Steam Gasification Process by Process Simulation

Abstract

Through the dual fluidized bed (DFB) steam gasification process, solid feedstock can be converted into a nitrogen-free product gas. Thereby, the DFB steam gasification offers a wellproven technology to produce heat, electricity, secondary liquid or gaseous energy carriers and valuable chemicals from wood as feedstock. DFB steam gasification was demonstrated for the gasification of wood at industrial scale between 8-32 MW fuel power at several sites. However, some of these plants suffered from difficult economic conditions if high-grade wood chips or even pellets were used as solid fuel. During the last years, a main research topic has been the utilization of low-cost residual and waste derived feedstocks. Therefore, a fuel flexible advanced reactor design was developed and constructed with 100 kW fuel power at TU Wien and tested since 2014. On the one hand, utilizing residues and waste fractions as feedstock provides a high potential to produce energy carriers, or commodities in a sustainable, ecofriendly and economic way. On the other hand, these feedstocks often have challenging fuel properties for thermo-chemical conversion processes. Although, various feedstocks were already tested at 100 kW fuel power, further investigations need to be done to prove or disprove operation stability at long-term test runs. For this reason, a scale-up to 1 MW fuel power is suggested to further study the long-term behavior of selected promising feedstock. The aim of this study is to provide design data for a basic engineering and to calculate key indicating parameters of a 1 MW fuel flexible plant.