MSW to synthetic natural gas: System modeling and thermodynamics assessment

To achieve environmental-friendly and energy-efficiency synthetic natural gas (SNG) production routing from municipal solid waste (MSW), a MSW-to-SNG process is unprecedentedly presented in this work, of which the designed configuration is developed and simulated with the aid of Aspen Plus. In addition, sensitivity analyses on major operation parameters, such as equivalence volume ratio (ER), steam-to-MSW mass ratio (S/M) and methanation pressure, are performed with the discussion of process efficiencies and SNG quality. In parallel, the comparison analysis is considered by adopting various MSW material. In this work, the composition of SNG mainly consists of 87.7% CH4, 2.9% CO2, 2.3% H2 and 7.1% N2. And lower heating value (LHV) together with Wobbe index of SNG are separately 31.66 MJ/Nm3 and 45.90 MJ/Nm3. Moreover, the wood-to-SNG, MSW-to-SNG and coal-to-SNG processes are carried out to demonstrate the superiority of the MSW-to-SNG process. The results reveal that the MSW-to-SNG process is a promising option to dispose MSW environmentally, meanwhile converting MSW to the valuable SNG.