Heat Transfer within Direct Heating Integrated Moving Bed Torrefier by Method of Lines

This work deals with the determination of the temperature profile within a direct heating moving bed torrefier in order to determine its minimum column height. A thermal model based on eulerian-eulerian two-phase solid-gas theory was performed and solved with the method of lines. In addition, this study allows to investigate the effect of the biomass particle size on the minimum torrefier column height. This investigation was performed by changing, simultaneously, the diameter of particles and the minimum fluidization velocity of the bed. Then, the calculations were made for a counter-current torrefaction reactor of 30 cm in diameter and for 5 kg/h of the feed rate of raw sugarcane bagasse. Results show that the height of the reactor column must be at least 30 cm for that are 1 mm in diameter and 108 cm for particles that are 2 mm in diameter.