Modeling the impact of bubbling bed hydrodynamics on tar yield and its fluctuations during biomass fast pyrolysis

• A bubbling bed for biomass fast pyrolysis was simulated using CFD.
• The effects of bubbling bed hydrodynamics on tar production were investigated.
• Effects of operating conditions on oscillation of tar yield were revealed.
• Slugging was found to be an important issue for oscillation of tar yield.

The impact of bubbling bed hydrodynamics on temporal variations in the exit tar yield for biomass fast pyrolysis was investigated using computational simulations of an experimental laboratory-scale reactor. A multi-fluid computational fluid dynamics model was employed to simulate the differential conservation equations in the reactor, and this was combined with a multi-component, multi-step pyrolysis kinetics scheme for biomass to account for chemical reactions. The predicted mean tar yields at the reactor exit appear to match corresponding experimental observations. Parametric studies predicted that increasing the fluidization velocity should improve the mean tar yield but increase its temporal variations. Increases in the mean tar yield coincide with reducing the diameter of sand particles or increasing the initial sand bed height. However, trends in tar yield variability are more complex than the trends in mean yield. The standard deviation in tar yield reaches a maximum with changes in sand particle size. The standard deviation in tar yield increases with the increases in initial bed height in freely bubbling state, while reaches a maximum in slugging state.

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