Experimental study of gas cleaning system on biomass gasification

Indonesia’s power plant is dominated by fossil fuel which is becoming rare and expensive. Since most of power plant is mainly concentrated on the major islands in the country, some islands especially smaller and remote island, have no electricity connection. Located on the tropical area, Indonesia is blessed with the vast amount of biomass diversity, which is considered as one of the potential energy sources to replace the fossil fuel. Biomass power plant with small capacity needs to be developed with the integrated system of gasification and generator set, for the electricity generation in that of small and remote island. However, the contaminants resulted in the biomass gasification process, is the major problems of the system. It has possibility to cause the engine damage. To avoid that problem, gas cleaning system should be properly designed before syngas entering the engine. This research is focused on wet scrubber as a gas cleaning system. The effectivity of the gas cleaning system is shown by the characteristic of wastewater leaves from the wet scrubber. The important characteristics of wastewater investigated in this study are turbidity, pH, and phenol concentration. From the experiment result, it was obtained that the performance of the wet scrubber in the gasification of coconut shell and palm shell gasification has average turbidity 3.4 – 12.9 NTU, average pH of 3.9 – 4.3, and an average phenol contains 113 – 2100 mg/L, respectively.