414 Co-generation System using Woody Biomass Energy

Abstract

A time has come to reflect on civilization blessed with convenient fossil fuels for the past 100years. Fossil fuels such as petroleum, coal, and natural gas have become limited resources. In addition, bad effects caused by excessive carbon dioxide (CO_2) have now begun destroying our global environment seriously. Since current living and economical standards depend strongly on fossil energy sources, it is necessary to realize a new society that utilizes biomass as a source of energy. In such background, we manufactured the practical Stirling engine using biomass fuels in 2005. And we proposed a unique co-generation system by the engine that uses woody biomass fuels. The co-generation system provided about 3kW of electricity and the heat from the system can be recovered and used in a number of ways for space and domestic water heating. The co-generation system is utilizes up to 45% of the system input energy in the form of electricity or heat. In this study, we tried to recover the waste heat of 43% by using a thermoelectric conversion module. And the Stirling cooler using electric power based woody biomass energy is tested in performance.