Cold Testings of a Windowed Fluidized Bed Reactor Using Quartz Sand for Solar Gasification of Coke
Abstract
A windowed fluidized bed reactor prototype was studied and developed for solar thermochemical gasification of coal cokes with steam and CO2. The windowed fluidized bed reactor is assumed to be combined with a newly developed beam-down optics. Recently, quartz sand was employed as a chemically-inert bed material for the fluidized bed and worked as a thermal transfer/storage medium inside the reactor for coke gasification under direct light irradiation. In order to design a laboratory-scale prototype windowed fluidized-bed containing of quartz sand and coke particles, the reactor model of fluidized bed was made from a transparent acrylic resin to allow us to observe a fluidizing particle through the sidewall of the reactor body; a branching tube is equipped with the sidewall of the reactor to continuously supply coal-coke particles from a screw feeder. In the present study, in order to evaluate fluidization performance of coal-cokes, the pressure loss between the inlet and outlet gases was examined, and descending coal-coke particles on the sidewall of the reactor was observed in the reactor model. The moving velocity and distance of descending particles from the top to bottom of fluidized bed were measured by the visual observation of the tracer particles on outside wall of reactor model.
Keywords
Solar thermochemical gasification, Coal-cokes, Fluidized bed reactor, Cold testing