Hydrogasification of HYDRANE char in fluidized and moving beds. [22 refs]

To satisfy future pipeline gas requirements, considerable process development work is being aimed at gasifying coal to produce substitute natural gas (SNG). The heart of many of the gasification processes being developed is a fluid-bed gasifier in which char is reacted with steam/oxygen or hydrogen. In the HYDRANE process, being developed at the U.S. Bureau of Mines, Pittsburgh Energy Research Center, char is reacted directly with hydrogen in the fluid-bed stage of the hydrogasifier. In order to scale-up the fluid-bed reactor to pilot plant or commercial size with confidence, a fluid-bed reactor model has been developed using the bubble-assemblage concept and has been shown to fit existing data reasonably well. Data from moving-bed reactor experiments and the corresponding model were compared to the fluid-bed results and illustrate the differences between plug-flow and well-mixed solid-gas reactors.