Tar yield and composition from poultry litter gasification in a fluidised bed reactor: effects of equivalence ratio, temperature and limestone addition

Air gasification of poultry litter was experimentally investigated in a laboratory scale bubbling fluidised bed gasifier. Gasification tests were conducted at atmospheric pressure using silica sand as the bed material. This paper examines the effect of the equivalence ratio (ER) in the range of 0.18–0.41, temperature between 700 and 800 C, and the addition of limestone blended with the poultry litter on the yield and composition of tar. An off-line solid phase adsorption method was employed in order to quantify tar compounds heavier than styrene, whereas lighter species such as benzene and toluene were measured by means of on-line micro gas chromatography. Total tar yields were in the range from 15.7 to 30.7 gtotal tar kgpoultry litter (dry and ash free basis) 1. These values are considered low with respect to the feedstocks with a higher organic fraction. It also needs to be noted that the yields of benzene and toluene were measured by on-line micro gas chromatography, a technique which inherently delivers higher tar values compared to commonly employed off-line techniques. By varying the ER, poultry litter blended with limestone showed a reduction in total tar yield whereas poultry litter on its own showed an increasing tar yield over the ER range tested. In the presence of limestone, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), heterocyclic compounds, toluene and benzene showed a tendency to reduce over the ER range tested. Since the ER also plays a crucial role in tar reduction, the reduction in tar cannot be unambiguously attributed to calcined limestone/lime (CaCO3/ CaO). Increasing the temperature was shown to be effective for reducing the total tar yield but the amounts of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons increased. However, no definitive correlation could be established between limestone/lime catalytic activity for tar reduction and elevated gasification temperature, because there was no possibility to study their effects separately. The chemical composition of the tar arising from poultry litter is distinctive compared with conventional lignocellulosic fuels linked to the fact that poultry litter has a higher nitrogen content (z6.5% w/w (dry and ash free basis)). Nitrogen-containing hydrocarbons such as pyridine, 2-methylpyridine, 2-methyl-1H-pyrrole and benzonitrile were identified in significant amounts. This study has demonstrated that poultry litter gasified in a bubbling fluidised bed yielded a product gas with relatively low tar content while its composition reflects the chemical nature of the feedstoc

Distributional chaos for strongly continuous semigroups of operators

Distributional chaos for strongly continuous semigroups is studied and characterized. It is shown to be equivalent to the existence of a distributionally irregular vector. Finally, a sufficient condition for distributional chaos on the point spectrum of the generator of the semigroup is presented. An application to the semigroup generated in L-2 (R) by a translation of the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck operator is also given.This work is supported in part by MEC and FEDER, Project MTM2010-14909, by Generalitat Valenciana, Projects PROMETEO/2008/101 and GV/2010/091, and by Universitat Politecnica de Valencia, Project PAID-06-0-92932. The second author also wants to acknowledge the support of the Project PAID-00-10 and of the grant FPI-UPV2009-04 from Programa de Ayudas de Investigacion y Desarrollo de la Universitat Politecnica de Valencia.Albanese, AA.; Barrachina Civera, X.; Mangino, EM.; Peris Manguillot, A. (2013). Distributional chaos for strongly continuous semigroups of operators. Communications on Pure and Applied Analysis. 12(5):2069-2082. https://doi.org/10.3934/cpaa.2013.12.2069S2069208212

Health Shocks and Risk Aversion

Risk preferences are typically assumed to be constant for an individual across the life cycle. In this paper we empirically assess if they are time varying. Specifically, we analyse whether health shocks influence individual risk aversion. We follow an innovative approach and use grip strength data to obtain an objective health shock indicator. In order to account for the non-random nature of our data we employ regression-adjusted matching. Health shocks are found to increase individual risk aversion. The finding is robust to a series of sensitivity analyses

Rapidity Gaps in Jet Events at DØ Rapidity Gaps in Jet Events at D

Abstract Preliminary results from the D experiment on jet production with rapidity gaps in pp collisions are presented. A class of dijet events with a forward rapidity gap is observed at center-of-mass energies p s = 1800GeV and 630 GeV. The numb e r o f e v ents with rapidity gaps at both center-of-mass energies is signi cantly greater than the expectation from multiplicity uctuations and is consistent with a hard di ractive process. A class of events with two forward gaps and central dijets is also observed at 1800GeV. This topology is consistent with hard double pomeron exchange