Combustion: A Sustainable Way to Generate Energy from Olive Pits and Its CFD Application

Abstract

Biomass combustion has become a crucial conversion process for producing a clean energy in the form of heat in domestic stoves and/or electricity in power plants. Currently, olive pits/stones are attractive solid biofuels due to their physic-chemical characteristics. However, the complexity of the combustion process and the heavy and high cost experimental tests have made the use of CFD calculations a strong necessity. Indeed, CFD based on modelling and simulation has proved the capability of optimising various combustion parameters up reaching the best solution. Hence, the present chapter gives a comprehensive review of the characteristics of olive pits in its raw and densified form and the performance of the combustion technologies. It explores, in another way, the mathematical equations governing the heat and mass transfer with a detail sub-model. It gives a detailed description of the heterogeneous and homogeneous chemical reactions phenomenon and the gas flow in the case of a fixed bed combustor fed by olive pits using comsol multiphysics.