HIGH-TEMPERATURE GASIFICATION OF BIOMASS

The potential of biomass to meet the world's energy demand has been widely recognized. There is a constant and consistent interest in the production of energy from biomass through gasification. Conventional biomass gasification concentrates on relatively low-temperature gasification, and the main problem is that the heating value of the product gas is low, and the content of tar is high due to the low conversion rate of carbon during pyrolysis and gasification processes. Tar can be reduced by thermal cracking that requires heating the tar to a high temperature. Many observations are reported to explain the complex nature of hightemperature gasification. This chapter summarized the publications on high-temperature gasification of biomass by the authors, and aims at analyzing the effect of physical and chemical properties of biomass on high-temperature gasification, and these mainly include high-temperature pyrolysis of biomass (in the second section), thermal cracking of biomass tar (in the third section), and high-temperature gasification of biomass char (in the fourth section). Some conclusions and outlook are also briefly stated in the last section.