Process Synthesis and the G-H Space for Analysing and Optimising Biomass Gasification

Abstract

Biomass is a key source of energy to power the world's growing hunger for energy, whilst replacing fossil fuels as the fight against greenhouse gas emissions intensifies. This has led to a significant focus on not only using biomass as a source of energy, but also on the need to use it optimally. Using graphical methods in process synthesis and using thermodynamic regions in the Enthalpy-Gibbs free energy (g-h) space has also become a fast-growing research field. The approach used in this article to optimise the conversion of biomass and minimise carbon dioxide production and energy consumption shows that the best place to operate the biomass gasification process is in a region where heat and work are required to be added to the process. Using the g-h approach allows one to determine whether or not heat at an appropriate temperature is sufficient to meet the work requirements of a chemical process and identify an optimum point in the gasification region where the work requirements of the process is zero, no carbon dioxide emissions and a minimum amount of heat is required to be added.