[Gasification] Using LPG/natural gas burners with, producer gas

[David Coote]

On 16/10/2012 6:00 AM, gasification-request at lists.bioenergylists.org wrote:

Thanks, Doug. That was very useful.

On a related note, I was at an ORC seminar yesterday where an ERK 
licensee was discussing the issues - including calorific variation - 
associated with burning producer gas in large scale gasification  
plants. He was emphasising that tight control of the feedstock was of 
paramount importance

Regards

David


>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Mon, 15 Oct 2012 15:07:54 +1300
> From: "doug.williams"<Doug.Williams at orcon.net.nz>
> To: "Discussion of biomass pyrolysis and gasification"
> 	<gasification at lists.bioenergylists.org>
> Subject: Re: [Gasification] Using LPG/natural gas burners with
> 	producer gas
> Message-ID:<EDB2ABF595E945DA811AE092921D55B0 at dougspc>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
>
> Hello David,
>
> Not sure if I can answer your question in a way that is of immediate relevance, as it's ongoing practical work in progress.
>
>    
>> I've just been doing some work comparing the costs of  thermal energy
>> from biomass systems against LPG/natural gas.
>>      
> Our development project in California at their location, has substantial financial advantage over LPG for glass house heating.
>
>    
>> A number of industry
>> references pointed out the importance of correctly configuring burners
>> to use gas of different calorific values. How is this best achieved with
>> producer gas where the calorific values can vary quite a bit?
>>      
> We went down the road of trying to use standard gas and oil type burners back around 1979-80 for producer gas, and found after nearly four years, that we were flogging a dead horse. Another year to 1985 saw the design of our cyclomix burner become reality, allowing it's proof of concept to be established.
>
> I made quite a few for our Pacific Class systems 90Nm3/hr of gas, and larger ones for a number of other special projects. Unfortunately, I never had an opportunity to set up a real testing programme dedicated to just these burners, so while they burn very well for their applications, we still are fine tuning their sizing parameters and emission control of NOX etc.
>
> All our new work on burners is being done as part of the development programme at CalForests gasification project in California. You can see some of the burners in action on the Fluidyne Archive www.fluidynenz.250x.com under the File Producer Gas Flares, Gasification Testing in Chile,  and some of the larger ones in the Californian Andes Gasifier Files.
>
> What I can tell you about producer gas combustion, is that if not completely mixed before ignition, the CO will enter the high temperature flame without igniting and revert to soot and CO2. This of course comes back to dealing with the variations of gas quality, which in our cyclomix burner, the flame just lengthens or shortens, but never blows out so long as some gas is present. Having said all this in a general way, the specifics of the gas making process determine the outcomes, just like the engine application and the problems that manifest in all manner of ways.
>
> Hope this may be of interest to you.
> Doug Williams,
> Fluidyne...
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>