Scientists Fix 30-Year-Old Flaw in Biomass Energy Model
Researchers discovered that a widely used chemical model for converting biomass into fuel has violated basic physics for decades, miscalculating how much tar escapes during heating. The fix, now implemented in new software, could improve efficiency predictions for industrial biofuel production and help energy companies optimize their conversion processes.
Originaltitel: Revisiting the Biomass Pyrolysis Chemical Percolation Devolatilization Model
<p>It is found that due to a simplification in the metaplast model, the original chemical percolation devolatilization (CPD) model does not ensure mass conservation. This is caused by the fact that evacuation of tar is only approximately accounted for in the underlying formulas derived from percolation theory. In this paper, a new version of the metaplast model is developed and implemented in a Julia-based solver. This correction also results in some corrections to the kinetic data for lignin, cellulose, and hemicellulose. The new Julia solver includes two versions, one for small particles where no spatial resolution is required and a spatially resolved version. The spatially resolved version is used to find that, even for pyrolyzing particles, a Biot number of unity is a sufficient criterion to determine when spatial models must be used.</p>