Optimizing and modeling of energy production based on catalytic gasification of saxaul as a new biomass

Energy and population growing has propelled the world to not‐clear one because of the pollutants produced from fossil fuels consumption, so, energy produced from green sources, such as biomass, has been known as a big challenge of developing and developed countries. This article presents the applicability of saxaul as an abundant nonusable wood for energy production based on computational experimental aspects. Hence, the low heating value (LHV) of the gaseous products of saxaul gasification was optimized and modeled against the process parameters, including processing time, temperature, and the catalytic amount using multi‐variates experimental design method. Moreover, the synthesized nano‐V2O5‐WO3/TiO2 was used as the catalyst and characterized using common analytical techniques including transmission electron microscopy (TEM), Energy dispersive X‐ray spectroscopy (EDX), X‐ray diffraction (XRD), and Brunauer–Emmett–Teller (BET) analysis. TEM image represented round particles with average size of 19 nm. XRD and EDX studies presented the successful formation of V2O5‐WO3 on TiO2 substrate. To study catalytic effect of nano‐V2O5‐WO3/TiO2, BET analyses were performed to determine the mean specific surface area of it before and after the gasification, which the initial value was 72 m2 g−1 and decreased to 67 m2 g−1 after the gasification. As the evaluation of energy production, the low heating values of gaseous products was calculated based on the multivariate model of process parameters. Furthermore, the low poisoning catalytic process in accompany with acceptable statistical indexes of modeling, R2 = 0.98, RAdj2 = 0.98, and RPred2 = 0.95, were resulted from green energy production of saxaul against the effective corresponding process parameters. © 2016 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Environ Prog, 36: 723–728, 2017