Syngas production from glycerol : a thermodynamic approach

Abstract

Nowadays, syngas production is an attractive process due to its high value at industrial scale. There are several ways for syngas generation but researchers are trying recently to find process leading to syngas production from a clean and renewable energy source. In this research, the focus is on syngas production from glycerol owing its importance as a clean and renewable energy carrier. Glycerol is formed via biodiesel production and it is highly available. It can be used in many applications such as fuel cells, food or pharmaceutical industries. Now, most of the efforts focus lately on the conversion of crude glycerol into syngas via different reactions such as reforming. In this work, a thermodynamic approach using Aspen Plus was conducted in order to optimize syngas generation while minimizing undesirable products formation such as water, methane, carbon dioxide and carbon solid. This study is based on varying two parameters: molar feed composition, temperature (range: 0-1000 °C) while keeping the pressure fixed at 1atm. The first set of simulations includes the addition of single component to glycerol such as H2O or CO2 to a fixed amount of glycerol. Then, the addition of two components called combined reforming (CO2+H2O). The inlet feed composition was varied based on the stochiometry of glycerol steam reforming and dry reforming. It can be concluded from the simulation results that syngas production is optimized in the presence of excess water and low amount of carbon dioxide under atmospheric pressure. For instance, conducting glycerol combined reforming under an inlet C3H8O3: H2O:CO2 molar ratio of 2:3:0.2 will lead to the optimization of hydrogen yield along with the minimization amounts of unreacted water, carbon dioxide and zero formation of methane and solid carbon deposits. From an environmental and industrial point of view, such a result is very promising due to the important applications of syngas at industrial scale.