Supercritical glycerol gasification optimisation using RSM methodology

In this paper, a mathematical model of supercritical gasification of glycerol was developed with Mathcad14 and validated using experimental results of literature previous work. The effect of three parameters: temperature, residence time and glycerol concentration, on the efficiency of gasification and hydrogen production (mol of H 2 /mol of glycerol) was studied. Using surface response methodology (RSM) by applying Box-Benkhen design of experiments, two quadratic models define the gasification efficiency and H 2 production according to the studied parameters, their results are in agreement with those of the developed program, and the analysis of variance (ANOVA) validated the obtained models. The effect of the parameters mere studied, also optimal operating conditions were obtained and the results show that a maximum of H 2 production and gasification efficiency are achieved at 603 °C and 6.6 s residence time for an initial concentration of 5wt% of glycerol.