The solid recovered fuel Stabilat®: Characteristics and fluidised bed gasification tests

The solid recovered fuel Stabilat® has a low water content which makes it ideal for thermochemical conversion processes such as gasification. The paper presents fuel characterisation and fluidised bed gasification experiments of the Stabilat® solid waste recovered fuel in two experimental facilities, aiming at assessing the product gas quality and bed agglomeration phenomena. The energy content of the gasification product gas was about 4.3 MJ Nm−3 and the process efficiency reached the value of 64.4%. The amount of HCl measured in the product gas ranged between 61.0 mg Nm−3 (700 °C, λ = 0.25) and 37.6 mg Nm−3 (800 °C, λ = 0.3). The total tar content was found between 2 and 6 g Nm−3 according to the gravimetric method, while the same range with GC measurements was 4–13 g Nm−3 (N2 free). No severe loss of fluidisation occurred up to 850 °C while electron microscopy investigation of the bed material and ash material revealed that some agglomerates were present, due to melting of glass particles inherent in the material while lower amount of ash and original bed material conglomerates. In all cases these phenomena did not cause any severe problems to fluidisation.