Fast biomass pyrolysis is receiving more attention recently as it offers a promising technology to utilize renewable biomass resources for liquid transportation fuels to meet increasing energy demand, while simultaneously providing a solution to mitigate serious environmental problems associated with fossil fuel utilization. However, large-scale production of biofuels faces significant challenges. One of these challenges requires overcoming limitations in the scale-up of related process equipment, such as vapor phase upgrading (VPU) reactors. The current study focuses on design and optimization of a circulating fluidized bed reactor for biomass pyrolysis vapor upgrading in which the vapor phase pyrolysis oils are chemically converted to chemistries that makes it more suitable for fuel or specialty chemical products. First, a multiscale Eulerian-Eulerian approach is developed and validated for modeling the gas-solid flow across all fluidization regimes encountered in several fluidized bed systems in the literature as well as an in-house experimental facility. Second, the validated CFD model is adopted to predict the solid residence time distributions in a CFB riser and compared to experimental data to further validate the ability of the model for RTD predictions. Finally, detailed numerical simulations for a pilot-scale biomass pyrolysis vapor upgrading system with simplified catalytic cracking kinetics under different operating conditions including solid circulation rate, gas flow rate and temperature are performed.<br/>

Study of residence time distribution in a circulating fluidized bed reactor for biomass pyrolysis vapor upgrading

255th National Meeting (2018)

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