A paper has been published describing a recent research milestone as part of the Collaborative Research and Development Agreement between Italy’s Sotacarbo Sustainable Energy Research Center and NETL’s MFS research program. The paper, entitled "Experimental validation of a multiphase flow model of a lab-scale fluidized-bed gasification unit," presents the results of a combined experimental and computational study of biomass gasification at a laboratory scale. The process is part of a carbon neutral technology for power generation and/or green hydrogen production. The goal of the collaborative work is to validate multiphase computational fluid dynamic (CFD) models based on NETL’s MFiX suite over a range of experimental scales using experimental systems located at Sotacarbo. The result is a validated modeling tool that can be used for simulation-based engineering and optimization of advanced reactors for energy and environmental applications.
This work studies an experimental campaign for cypress wood chips in a lab-scale bubbling fluidized-bed gasification unit in different operation modes including pyrolysis, air-blown gasification and steam gasification of char. The NETL MFiX code was able to simulate the process and accurately predict the syngas composition over the range of experiments. NETL’s High Performance Computing system Joule was used as the primary computational resource for this research.
