Lab-scale investigation of palm shell char as tar reforming catalyst

Abstract

This research investigated the application of palm shell char as a catalyst for the catalytic steam reforming of tar after the sorption enhanced gasification (SEG) process. The catalytic activities of palm shell char and metal-supported palm shell char were tested in a simulated SEG derived syngas with tar model compounds (i.e., toluene and naphthalene) at a concentration of 10 g m-3 NTP. The results indicated that palm shell char had an experimentally excellent catalytic activity for tar reforming with toluene and naphthalene conversions of 0.8 in a short residence time of 0.17 s at 900 °C. A theoretical residence time to reach the complete naphthalene conversion was 1.2 s at 900 °C for palm shell char, demonstrating a promising activity similar to wood char and straw char, but better than CaO. It was also found that potassium and iron-loaded palm shell chars exhibited much better catalytic activity than palm shell char, while the parallel reaction of gasification of K-loaded palm shell char influenced the conversion with its drastic mass loss. Moreover, contrary to CaO, palm shell char presented relatively low selectivity to benzene, and its spontaneous gasification generated extra syngas. In summary, the present study demonstrated that the low-cost material, palm shell char, can successfully be used as the tar-reforming catalyst after SEG process.