Date of Award

December 2016

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Department

Engineering

First Advisor

Ryoichi S. Amano

Committee Members

John Reisel, Woo Jin Chang, M. Mahmun Hossain, Istvan Lauko

Keywords

Chicken Manure, Differential Thermal Analysis, Evolved Gas Analysis, Gasification, Pyrolysis, Thermo-Gravimetric Analysis

Abstract

The dependency on renewable resources of energy in power production is a necessary step that mankind has to take if we want our advances in life and technology to resume. In a century or two, fossil fuels will be depleted, and if we do not start to take action, Energy will be the most expensive and rare item on our planet. Biomass is one of the sources of renewable energy with an advantage of being the closest in characteristics to fossil fuels. The evolved gases are similar to fossil fuel gases which makes itthe easiest source to switch to, with the least infrastructure required. In this doctoral thesis, the experimental study of the Pyrolysis and gasification of chicken manure is presented. Both evolved gas analysis (EGA) and thermo-gravimetric analysis (TGA) have been investigated in details using different gasifying agents. In EGA, the concentrations and the mass flow rates of different evolved gases were presented and the mass flow rates were used to calculate the energy and carbon conversion efficiencies. Different gases including (N2, air, CO2, steam, and mixtures) were used as the gasifying agents, and the effect of temperature 600-1000oC was tested. The effect of adding oxygen to steam gasification at 900oC was studied and presented in details. In TGA, the degradation and rate of degradation of the mass was analyzed with different gases (N2, air, and CO2) for various heating rates (5-40oC/min.) using the extent of reaction, α. The order of reaction model was then used to find the chemical kinetic parameters for the different gases.

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