Compressed air concentrated solar pyrolysis furnace: A techno-environment-economic case study in Qinghai

Biomass pyrolysis is widely implemented for production of bio-fuels due to its flexibility and renewability. However, conventional biomass pyrolysis is predominantly achieved via electrical heating, which mostly derives from non-renewable fossil fuels. Hence, this paper proposes a solar pyrolysis furnace to achieve heating from solar concentration via a solar parabolic dish. The energy provision is accomplished by a flow of solar heated compressed air inside metal coils wrapping around the pyrolysis tube. The conceptual design was conducted using Solidworks software with the numerical simulation performed with its Flow Simulation studio. The simulation results indicate that the proposed design is able to achieve operation temperature of more than 500 °C with a heating rate of 18.0 °C ∙ min^-1, which is comparable to commercially-available electrical furnaces. The available heat provision to the unit mass of biomass during pyrolysis is up to 1.24 MJ∙kg^-1. A case study in Qinghai was also performed to understand the economic and environmental performance of the proposed design where the results are promising. This work establishes the potential of the proposed concentrated solar furnace, from technical, environmental and economic perspectives, for wider applications, particularly for biomass pyrolysis in deriving clean energy and functional carbon materials.