Improving the environmental impact of palm kernel shell through maximizing its production of hydrogen and syngas using advanced artificial intelligence

Fossil fuel depletion and the environmental concerns have been under discussion for energy production for many years and finding new and renewable energy sources became a must. Biomass is considered as a net zero CO2 energy source. Gasification of biomass for H-2 and syngas production is an attractive process. The main target of this research is to improve the production of hydrogen and syngas from palm kernel shell (PKS) steam gasification through defining the optimal operating parameters using a modern optimization algorithm To predict the gaseous outputs, two PKS models were built using fuzzy logic based on the experimental data sets. A radial movement optimizer (RMO) was applied to determine the system's optimal operating parameters. During the optimization process, the decision variables were represented by four different operating parameters. These parameters include; temperature, particle size, CaOlbiomass ratio and coal bottom ash (CBA) with their operating ranges of (650-750 degrees C), (0.5-1 mm), (0.5-2) and wt% (0.02-0.10), respectively. The individual and interactive effects of different combinations were investigated on the production of H2 and syngas yield. The optimized results were compared with experimental data and results obtained from Response Surface Methodology (RSM) reported in literature. The obtained optimal values of the operating parameters through RMO were found 722 degrees C, 0.92 mm, 1.72 and 0.06 wt% for the temperature, particle size, CaO/biomass ratio and coal bottom ash, respectively. The results showed that syngas production was significantly improved as iL reached 65.44 vol% which was better than that obtained in earlier studies. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.