A comprehensive experimental procedure for CO2 coal gasification: Is there really a maximum reaction rate?

A novel procedure to perform carbon dioxide (CO2) gasification studies was tested with two different Alberta coals and compared to the most common procedures using thermogravimetric analysis (TGA). The designed experiments indicate that maximum reaction rates reported in the literature were probably a consequence of the increasing CO2 concentration in the gas mixture when the inert gas was switched to CO2. It has been proven that, independent of feedstocks, the time to observe this maximum reaction rate was constant, indicating the reported maximum reaction rate depends only on the gas dispersion when the gasifying agent is fed and not on the surface properties of the char.