Review and analysis of biomass gasification models

The use of biomass as a source of energy has been further enhanced in recent years and special attention has been paid to biomass gasification. Due to the increasing interest in biomass gasification, several models have been proposed in order to explain and understand this complex process, and the design, simulation, optimisation and process analysis of gasifiers have been carried out. This paper presents and analyses several gasification models based on thermodynamic equilibrium, kinetics and artificial neural networks. The thermodynamic models are found to be a useful tool for preliminary comparison and for process studies on the influence of the most important fuel and process parameters. They have the advantage of being independent of gasifier design, but they cannot give highly accurate results for all cases. The kinetic-based models are computationally more intensive but give accurate and detailed results. However, they contain parameters that limit their applicability to different plants. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.