Thermal Combustion of Rice Husk to Generate Product Gas for Engine Applications

Increasing demand of fuel leads to increases in the fuel rates, due to depletion of the available fossil fuel. So, the need of alternative source of energy to meet the rural/urban demand. The combustible gas from agriculture biomass is plays a major potential sources for energy production. As an agriculture country, India has large biomass resources nearly 40 to 60 percentage of agriculture residues either put to inefficient use. Thermal combustion is a versatile thermo-chemical conversion process which produces a gas mixture of H2, CO and CH4 that can be used for heat and power applications. In this work, a circulating bed gasifier was designed and developed to use rice husk as a feed stock. An investigation was also carried out to evaluate the performance and emission parameters of a CI engine developing rated power of 3.7 kW at a maximum speed of 1500rpm running on a dual fuel operation. The product gas was introduced in the inlet manifold of engine along with air flow rate at 40%, 60% and 80% load condition with respect to the full load. Diesel was injected into the engine as primary fuel and producer gas was injected as secondary fuel. The results obtained from the dual fuel mode were compared with standard primary fuel operation. Results indicated that a decrease in the consumption of diesel was observed upto 14 % when operated on dual fuel mode though there was a reduction in brake thermal efficiency. Oxides of nitrogen was found to be very low in dual fuel operation which is a great advantage over diesel alone, but CO and HC emission for dual fuel mode was found to be higher than diesel.