Techno-economic analysis of the integration of oxygen membranes for oxygen production in biomass gasification plants

This thesis is relying on modeling of MIEC membranes inside a gasifier and it seeks to find an appropriate configuration to use in gasification setup for pure oxygen production and use it inside the gasifier in a gasification process. Application of pure oxygen instead of air can play a key role in gasification processes. Since conventional methods for separation of oxygen such as cryogenic distillation are energy intensive and some of them cannot provide full purity for oxygen, an alternative method can be a good option. This substitute method which is the focus of this study, can be achieved by using specific ceramic membranes directly inside the gasifier. Although some effort have been spent on these membranes, there is still a lack of study on direct integration inside gasifier using this technology. In the present work, a modeling study of these membranes has been carried out using Engineering Equation Solver (EES). EES is a commercial software package used for solution of systems of simultaneous non-linear equations. The gasifier model was previously prepared and was studied to simulate the behavior of a downdraft gasifier. During the simulation some hypothesizes are assumed to make the available flux, model for the chosen membrane, keep working. Besides, an alternative membrane is assumed to have more precise results. Then all the suggested configurations were studied based on energy consumption and economic aspects. The economic studies was focused on the alternative which had lower flux. So, the area of the membrane required is more. Finally, the results where compared with a similar cryogenic distillation plant used to produce pure oxygen.