VOL. 11, NO.

8, APRIL 2016 ISSN 1819-6608

ARPN Journal of Engineering and Applied Sciences
©2006-2016 Asian Research Publishing Network (ARPN). All rights reserved.

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SYNTHETIC GAS (SYNGAS) PRODUCTION IN DOWNDRAFT CORNCOB

GASIFIER AND ITS APPLICATION AS FUEL USING CONVENTIONAL
DOMESTIC (LPG) STOVE
Suhartono, Bayu Dwi Prasetyo and Ikrimah Nur Azizah
Department of Chemical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Universitas Jenderal Achmad Yani, Cimahi, Indonesia
E-Mail: suhartono@lecture.unjani.ac.id

ABSTRACT
This research was proposed to an enviromentally fuel from syngan of corncob. The feasibility and operation
performance of corncob gasification in small downdraft gasifier was studied. The concorb gasification was carried out at
30-35% of the necessary air for stoichiometric combustion (the equivalent ratio, Φ= ±0.35). The gasification temperature
of 600-800 0C and the fire power of gasifier, FP of 5 kW th were obtained in this experiment. The syngas could be burned
with a reddish blue flame like liquid petroleum gas (LPG) in conventional domestic stove. The air flow rate of 0.1-0.2
kg/min. for syngas combustion (about 50% for complete combustion) generated flame temperature of around 850 0C. The
thermal efficiency and the cold gas efficiency about 40% and 70%, respectively. Economic and energy evaluation of
corncob and syngas utilization was also conducted. The potential energy of waste corncob could fulfill the energy needs of
the entire small industries that are located in West Bandung District. An implementation study of syngas utilization in one
of the small industries for cooking fish gave the gross profit margin about IDR 15,749. The difference profit between the
use of LPG and the use of syngas was about IDR 1,716 /kg fish. The utilization of waste corncob on a small industry as a
pilot scale is expected to substitute the use of ±29 million kg of LPG/year.

Keywords: gasifier, corncob, synthetic gas, thermal efficiency.

INTRODUCTION in corn production has been promoted national wide. In

In 2025, new and renewable energy resources 2014, corn production is estimated at 19.13 million tons of
may contribute up to 5% energy consumption in dry seed or increased by 0.62 million tons (3.33 percent)
Indonesia. The new and renewable energy resources compared with the previous year [3].
include biomass [1]. Biomass is the main source of In order to use corncob in a thermal conversion
domestic energy requirement in Indonesia. Most of that mode, appropriate design of corncob gasifier are needed.
biomass derived from agricultural and plantation waste By using of small downdraft gasifier, corncob may be
which reached 85%, while the rest come from forestry converted into synthetic gas (syngas) that can be burned as
waste sector [2]. Biomass is more widely used in the LPG. Syngas has the potential to replace LPG since the
household and small industry sector for cooking, about combustion of gaseous mixture of CO and H2 can be
84%, but its utilization is still as a conventional fuel by complete, thus minimizing the emissions of products of
using a simple stove. However, biomass as solid fuel incomplete combustion (PIC), which is a major problem
provides very poor performance environmentally and with solid fuel combustion.
lowers thermal efficiency. Traditional biomass stoves have Conventional updraft gasifiers have a high
low thermal efficiency and high flue gas emission. production of tars in the synthetic gas [4, 5]. Small
Liquid petroleum gas (LPG) is one of the conventional updraft gasifiers are in general give unstable
conventional sources of fuel for cooking in Indonesia. The flame in combustion of its syngas and so are unsuitable for
use of LPG as a source of fuel is common both in many applications such as heat generation for household
household and small industry. The need of LPG for every cooking and small industry use [6].
household and small industry is about 0.25 kg/day and 30 This work presents feasibility and operation
kg/day, respectively. Since LPG is easy to control, performance of the gasification study, as well as economic
convenient to operate and clean to use through emission of and energy evaluation of corncob and syngas utilization.
blue flame, therefore it is widely adopted for household Application of corncob gasifier offers the possibility of
and small industry use. However, because of the continued cleaner, better controlled cooking gas for the household or
increase in the price of LPG, that fuel become scarce and small industry. The inexpensive corncob gasification can
hard to find. This condition will drive up the utilization of bring the advantages of cooking with synthetic gas fuel to
biomass as one of alternative and renewable energy substitute the expensive LPG use.
resources. Therefore pyrolysis and gasification can make it The experiment study of corncob gasification in a
more equivalent to LPG for the end user. design downdraft gasifier was used to find performance
Corncob is potential alternative energy resource parameters of gasifier, which play an important role in the
with respect to the availability in a sufficient amount. design of gasifier. While the using of syngas in domestic
Corncob is a type of agricultural waste that piled up at LPG stove was meant to find fuel consumption, maximum
many small corn grain drying units. Recently, agribusiness surface flame temperature and thermal efficiencies that

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ARPN Journal of Engineering and Applied Sciences
©2006-2016 Asian Research Publishing Network (ARPN). All rights reserved.

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could be achieved. Economic feasibility was evaluated In theoretical calculation, the amount of air supplied
based on these parameters. during the combustion of syngas is the same as air
stoichiometric needs to achieve the maximum surface
GASIFICATION flame temperature. In calculation of excess air or lean air,
Gasification is the thermo-chemical conversion of it was assumed that the excess air or uncombustible has
solid fuel into a gas contains carbon monoxide (CO), taken the heat of the flame and reduced the maximum
hydrogen (H2), and methane (CH4). Converting corncob surface flame temperature (actual measured temperature).
into thermal energy using gasifier can increase the thermal The air flow rate of gasified air and combustion air was
efficiency up to twice, rather than conventional corncob controlled by using regulator valves and the flow rate was
combustion [5, 7]. measured using a digital anemometer Krisbow-KW06-
Corncob can be gasified by converting into 653. While the actual surface flame temperature of syngas
combustible carbon monoxide due thermo chemical combustion was measured by using digital thermocouple
reaction of the oxygen in air and the carbon available in Krisbow-KW06-283.
corncob. The gasification process is accomplished with
excess carbon as partial combustion. In order to gasify
corncob, about 30-40% of the stoichiometric air (6.0 kg of
air per kg corncob is needed) [4, 5, 6, 7, 8].
Most of gasification processes are air-blown
gasification processes, which produce low calorific value
synthetic gas with a typical heating value (HHV) of 4-7
MJ/Nm-3 [5, 8]

POTENTIAL ENERGY FROM WASTE CORNCOB

The availability waste corncob was conducted by
compilation and analysis through survey of primary and
secondary data sources from agriculture and forestry
department and statistic central bureau in West Bandung
District. The result of the waste corncob availability study
was then used to predict the energy sufficiency of all small
industries by implemented the corncob downdraft gasifier Figure-1. Sketch of the gasifier and LPG domestic burner
in one of small industries.
EQUIVALENT RATIO, �
PHYSICAL PROPERTIES OF CORNCOB The equivalent ratio, Φ is commonly used to
Corncob was collected from West Bandung indicate quantitatively whether a fuel-air mixture is rich,
District, West Java Province. Corncob was selected as lean, or stochiometric. In the corncob gasification process,
feedstock for testing of a design downdraft gasifier. The the equivalent ratio, Φ indicate whether the gasifier is
corncob was cut into small pieces and store in a dry place operating in the pyrolytic mode, combustion mode or
for further use. Elements and proximate analysis were gasification mode. For combustion of syngas, the
carried out before testing by using method suggested by equivalent ratio is to determine whether the syngas is
ASTM D 4442-92 and E 1755-95. operating in complete combustion. The equivalent ratio is
defined as [9]:
EXPERIMENTAL SET UP
A downdraft gasifier was designed and
constructed using mild steel sheet with 8 mm thickness
from inexpensive waste local material. The total height of (1)
the gasifier was 0.95 m with a height of 70 cm and 25 cm The value of Φ = 1 is means that the amount of
combustion chamber and charcoal chamber, respectively. air supplied for stoichiometric of one kg syngas. In this
The inner diameter and outer diameter gasifier �
work, the stoichiometric air/fuel, ratio was
was 35 cm and 45 cm, respectively. The insulation of the � ����.
gasifier was made up of castable with 10 cm thickness and determined based on ultimate analysis of synthetic gas (C,
a mild steel exterior cladding to encounter higher �
H, S, O), while the actual air/fuel, was calculated
temperature up to 1400 0C, Figure-1. � ���.
The system was assembled with one 6 W blower from the combustion air flow rate and syngas flow rate.
for supplying air. The airflow was divided in two streams
by using two pipes with 3.0 cm and 4.5 cm in diameter, THERMAL PROPERTIES OF FUEL
respectively. One airflow was used to gasify corncob fuel The lower heating value (LHV) of corncob was
in gasifier, while the other one was used as combustion air evaluated using ASTM method base on elements and
for burning syngas. The combustion air was intended for proximate analysis. Energy potential of corncob as
properly mixing to obtain a full combustion of the syngas.

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feedstock gasification fuel in the West of Bandung District

was estimated by using the following formula:
(8)

(2) Corncob consumption rate during gasification

process was calculated by equation. (9).
Syngas samples from corncob gasification
process were taken on particularly experiments and
analyzed using chromatography gas Shimadzu CR9. The
gas composition was then used to calculate LHV of syngas (9)
by using equation. (3) [5]. Gasifier capacity in batch was tested by corncob
feed with full capacity of about ±8 kg. This Gasifier
(3) capacity was also estimated by average of fuel
consumption rate for each experiment.
THERMAL EFFICIENCY
Thermal efficiency is the ratio of energy used in
RESULT AND DISCUSSION
boiling and evaporation of water with heat energy
available in the fuel. Thermal efficiency can be determined
SELF SUFFICIENT ENERGY
by measuring the amount of heat absorbed by the fuel, and
West Bandung District is one of the areas in the
dividing by the total amount of fuel used. To calculate
province of West Java which has plantations and
thermal efficiency of gasifier the following mathematical
agriculture field. Sub-sectors such as plantation and
formula was adopted [9]:
agricultural crops, particularly corn have a very important
and strategic role in the national/regional development and
give a big influence not only to food security, but also to
(4)
the adequacy of energy needs and an increase in the local
In the current work, the energy efficiency was revenue.
done by boiling amount of water (from 25 0C to about 100 In West Bandung District there are 23 small food
0
C) and by frying small fishes until cooked (from 25 0C to industries. All those industries use LPG as a source of
boiling point of cooking oil, 250 0C). The mass energy for its production. The need for LPG average in
measurement was carried out by a strain gauge base every small industry is 12-30 kg LPG/day (46.607 MJ/kg).
weighing balance with digital display. Water or oil The waste of corncob from agricultural
cooking temperature was measured by digital plantations in West Bandung District was estimated at
thermocouple Krisbow-KW06-283. 11,960 tons/year and this corncob has potential energy
Thermal efficiency also be defined as cold gas approximately 46,903,064 MJ/year (calculated by
efficiency by using the relevant formula was [10]: equation. (3)). This energy potential can fulfill the LPG
needs (5,089,494 MJ/year) throughout the small industries
in that region. By application of this design downdraft
(5) gasifier and burner system (modification of conventional
LPG stove), the utilization of waste corncob via
In this experiment, the synthetic gas was used for gasification process on a small industry is expected to
direct burning works for boiling of water or frying of substitute the use of ± 29 million kg of LPG/year.
small fishes. The thermal efficiency of syngas was
calculated by equation. (6) [4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]. FUEL COMPOSITION ANALYSIS
Corncob was obtained from West Bandung
District. The composition analysis is presented in Table-1.
(6) The element contents of C and H would determine in
quality and quantity of syngas produced. By mean of
Corncob consumption during water boiling or water content of 10.97%, corncob could be used as a
small fish cooking test on each gasification process was feedstock fuel to gasify without drying pretreatment. Low
calculated by using equation. (7). water content would also reduce ignition time and start up
time, as well as reducing wasted energy for heating
corncob in drying zone during gasification process. In this
(7) work, water content of 10.97% gave the startup time 0.14
The weighing balance of corncob consumption hour.
was used to determine the average firepower, FP. The FP The average syngas composition during
is a ratio of the fuel energy consumed by the gasifier per gasification process on the specific operating conditions at
unit time. The FP was calculated by using equation. (8) gasified air flow rate about 0.1653 kg/min. or about 0.6
[10]. Nm3/kg of air consumption is presented in Table-3.
Syngas composition’s data from Li Yuping [11] was used
as a comparison.

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Table-1. Element analysis of West Bandung’s corncob. supposed that the gasifier was still operating in pyrolysis
mode [9].

GASIFIER PERFORMANCE
In this experiment, corncob was chosen for
testing the performance of the gasifier implementation by
using dual LPG burner. Each experiment used 7 kg and 8
of corncob with ± 3cm in size and average calorific value
of 16.632 kJ/kg and water content of 10.97%. Gasifier
performance was represented by the parameters which
were calculated from experimental data, as presented in
Table-3.
The large porosity, small density and large
content of volatile matter of corncob could cause oxidation
reaction more quickly in the gasifier reactor and it would
effect on the shorter start-up time. Nevertheless, it would
lead to increase the consumption of corncob.

Table-2. Proximate analysis of synthetic gas. Table-3. Gasifier performance.

The smaller size and relatively uniform of

corncob and voids in corncob bed on gasifier would
facilitate the flow of incoming air. It would accelerate of
The purified syngas composition from pyrolysis oxidation and reduction process and increase the value of
of corncob by Li Yuping was used as a comparison with FCR and FP. Differences in the amount of corncob fuel
this work. The differences of composition was caused by feed into the gasifier led to differences in rates of fuel
the purification of its syngas [11]. Synthesis gas consumption and fire power (Table-3). In this work, on
purification led to lower nitrogen content and increase the each experiment by using a number of different corncob
combustable gases content. Commonly, the synthetic gas let the slower of FCR and FP, this was due to voids of
composition produce from biomass (corncob) gasification corncob bed in the gasifier becomes smaller. The
is in the range of 10-20% H2, 10-20% CO, 2-4% CH4, oxidation and pyrolysis process also became slower.
12% CO2 and 52,5-62,5% N2 [5, 11, 12]. Therefore,
according to the range of these composition of CO, H2, FLAME TEMPERATURE OF BURNING SYNGAS
CH4, the syngas from this work still could be burned with Flame temperature of burning syngas, TF, from
stable flame in modified domestic conventional burner corncob gasification tended to increase and then decrease
[14, 15]. due to duration of time, as shown in Figure-2. this was
In this experiment, according to the carbon because of the gasification conducted in batch process.
dioxide content in syngas, it was supposed that oxidation The decreasing corncob in gasifier could cause flammable
still dominate rather than pyrolysis and reduction. The gases in the syngas decreased, as well as decreased syngas
supplied air to gasified corncob approximately 0.6 Nm3/kg heating value and flame temperature. In these experiments,
(equivalent ratio Φ was about 0.35) was obtained in this the syngas flow rate was not constant over time; it was
experiment. Because of the theoretical air requirement for because of inconstant gasified air flow rate. Other
corncob gasification is about 1.3 to 1.7 Nm3/kg. It could operating conditions (e.g: temperature, pressure, corncob
be concluded that the gasified air feeding was rather small. properties) were might also affect this syngas flow rate.
The small gasified air would affected on the composition The average maximum surface flame temperature of each
of the syngas produced. According this condition, it was experiment approximately 800-900 0C. It was achieved at
the time of 90-20 minutes and gasified air flow rate of 0.1-

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0.2 kg/min. (25 0C) and cold syngas flow rate of 0.2-0.3 average thermal efficiencies were calculated by using
kg/min. (±50 0C). equation. (4) and equation. (6), as shown in Table-4.
The greater or smaller of the air-syngas ratio Thermal efficiency, ηth based on cold gas analysis was
value, Φ than stoichiometric equivalent ratio, Φ = 1 lead bigger than others, it was because of the using of syngas
to reduce the composition of the flammable gases (CO, H 2, heating value (4500 kJ/kg) that excluded the heat used in
CH4). This would affect the quality of the resulting flame. its calculations. While the others thermal efficiency
The heating value of syngas and its flammable gases utilized of heat for boiling of water or cooking small fishes
content could be indicated by a flame profile. The syngas in its calculation.
would be difficult to burn when the surface flame color
would be reddish yellow. ECONOMIC STUDIES
Economical implementation of corncob gasifier
in one of the small industries in the area of West Bandung
District was accomplished on the basis of the used of
corncob and electricity, excluding the investment of
gasifier.
In each gasifier runs, 7 and 8 kg corncob and 1 kg
of fish was needed. The cost required for electricity
consumption of 6 W blower was around IDR 2,991, while
the cost of the used of corncob for 1 kg of fish was about
IDR 250. The gross profit margin by using corncob was
IDR 15,749. On the other hand, as a comparison gross
profit margin by using LPG for cooking fish was IDR
14,032/kg of fish. The difference between the benefit of
the use of LPG and the use of corncob was IDR 1,716/kg
fish.

CONCLUSIONS
Figure-2. Surface flame temperature. The energy need (5,089,494 MJ/year) of 23 small
industries in West Bandung District is expected to be
fulfilled by waste corncob (46,903,064 MJ/year) via
gasification process by using this design downdraft
gasifier system. The downdraft gasifier of 5 kWth and 40%
of thermal efficiency produced syngas that could be
burned in a reddish blue stable flame like LPG in modified
conventional domestic stove. The flame temperature of
about 850 0C could achieve by burning of this syngas. The
gross profit margin of syngas utilization in one of the
small industries for cooking fish was IDR 15,749. The
profit difference between the using of syngas and LPG
was around IDR 1,716 /kg fish.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We acknowledge the financial support of PUPT-
SIMLITABMAS BATCH 1, RISTEKDITIK, F.Y
Figure-3. Equivalent ratio, Φ. 2014/2015, Indonesia.

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