Plasma Gasification Reactor

Description: Plasma gasification is a high-temperature waste-treatment process that converts organic material into synthetic gas, using an electric arc to generate plasma hot enough to ionize and break down feedstock into syngas and an inert solid residue — a technique used to treat waste and process biomass and heavy hydrocarbons like coal and petroleum sands into usable fuel gas. This project uses ANSYS Fluent to simulate the airflow and heat distribution inside such a reactor, capturing how the hot inlet streams behave as they meet and rise toward the outlet.

Methodology: The reactor is modeled in 2D in Design Modeler as a symmetrical chamber with two side inlets and a single outlet along the top edge, meshed in ANSYS Meshing with a structured grid of 8,711 elements. Hot gas enters through both side inlets at 0.1 m/s and 2000 K, exiting through the top outlet at atmospheric pressure, while the side walls are held at a fixed 600 K to represent heat loss through the chamber boundary; the case is run to convergence to resolve how the two opposing inlet streams interact and how heat is transported through the domain.

Analysis: Results include 2D contours of pressure, velocity, and temperature, along with path lines and velocity vectors. Pressure drops as the flow approaches the outlet, the maximum velocity occurs at the center of the chamber where the two inlet streams collide and merge, and the highest temperatures sit at the inlets, cooling as the gas mixes and moves toward the walls. These results illustrate how colliding opposed streams shape the internal velocity and temperature fields inside the reactor, giving a clear picture of the thermal-flow behavior central to plasma gasification performance.