Mustafa N., Li C., Doevendans T., Chin S., Karim Ghani A., 2015, Fluidised Bed Gasification of Oil Palm Frond (OPF) and Napier Grass (NG): A Preliminary Study, Chemical Engineering Transactions, 45, 1441-1446.
Energy poverty due to the lack of adequate access to modern energy services is a developmental challenge that still grips more than 180 thousand rural Malaysian households. Inadequate access to affordable energy presents a major obstacle to development in such communities, limiting educational and economic opportunities. Thus, sustainable power generation from in-situ biomass available via thermal conversion technology (gasification) is proposed in this study to overcome this issue. Two energy crops namely Oil Palm Frond (OPF) and Napier Grass (NG) have been characterized and tested in an electrical furnace bench-scale fluidised bed gasifier (54 mm diameter and 850 mm height) at gasifier bed temperature (800 °C) and equivalence ratio (ER) (0.20 - 0.4). Both OPF and NG were characterized as high volatiles (> 80 %), moderate calorific value (16 %) but low ash content (< 7 %). However, NG shows significant higher moisture content (30 %) as compared to OPF. These properties shows a great influence in their gasification performance where higher oil content (12 - 20 %) and lower syngas (< 5 %) were observed for NG as compared to OPF. Furthermore, it is evident from this research that ER showed a significance influence on enhancing hydrogen production. As a conclusion, these biomasses showed a potential candidate as gasification feedstock.
