Organic Waste Gasification by Ultra-Superheated Steam

Abstract

The perspective of the emerging environmentally friendly and economically efficient detonation gun technology for the high-temperature gasification of organic wastes with ultra-superheated mixture of steam and carbon dioxide is discussed. The technology is readily scalable and allows the establishment of a highly reactive atmospheric-pressure environment in a compact water-cooled gasifier due to very high local temperature (above 2000 °C), intense in situ shock-induced fragmentation of feedstock, and high-speed vortical convective flows enhancing interphase exchange processes. These unique and distinctive features of the technology can potentially provide the complete conversion of solid and liquid wastes into syngas, consisting exclusively of hydrogen and carbon monoxide; microparticles, consisting of environmentally safe simple oxides and salts of mineral residues, as well as aqueous solutions of oxygen-free acids such as HCl, HF, H2S, etc., and ammonia NH3. A small part of the syngas product (ideally approximately 10%) can be used for replacing a starting fuel (e.g., natural gas) for the production of a detonation-born gasifying agent, while the rest can be utilized for the production of electricity, heat, and/or chemicals.