A laboratory study of the co-firing of biomass with coal

Processes are being developed that will use both biomass/waste and coal with biomass/waste as fuels, with the aim of minimising the impact of energy production on the environment. An important part of these larger scale developments are laboratory scale studies done at universities to gain an understanding of the process science, in advance of design and testing at the larger (more expensive) scale. At Imperial College studies have been done to gain an understanding of the behaviour of biomass and coal/biomass mixtures when combusted and gasified under conditions that are relevant to air blown gasifiers and combusters. The work has been done using laboratory scale reactors: a fluidised bed reactor provides a regime where particles are essentially separated from each other, whilst a fixed bed reactor provides an environment where particles are in close contact and can potentially interact more. In this paper we report studies on the reactivity of and trace element releases from several coals, biomasses and mixtures of coal and biomass.