A novel biomass gasification based cascaded hydrogen and ammonia synthesis system using Stoichiometric and Gibbs reactors

This paper focuses on a new configuration of biomass gasification based cascaded ammonia synthesis and proposes two different configurations of ammonia synthesis system using the Stoichiometric and Gibbs reactors in the Aspen Plus V11. A new heat recovery technique from biomass gasification using syngas cooling is also proposed in this study. The proposed configuration comprises of a biomass gasifier, a heat recovery unit for syngas cooling, a combined cycle, water gas shift reactor system (WGSRS), pressure swing adsorption (PSA) and ammonia production unit. The ammonia based carbon-capturing system is incorporated to ultimately capture the CO₂ emissions. The sensitivity analyses are conducted on each significant subsystem employed in the proposed configuration. The results obtained from the Gibbs reactors show that pressure has a positive effect while very high-temperature effects negative on the ammonia synthesis. The results also reveal that the cascaded ammonia synthesis offers high ammonia conversion rates. The designed system produces 21.9 kmol/h of ammonia and 3405 kW electrical power. The results obtained from the present sensitivity analysis are further presented and discussed.