Experimental and simulation study of carbon capture in medical waste fluidized bed combustion.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the use of health services has increased significantly, therefore, the production of medical waste also experienced a high increase. The most appropriate and suitable technology to destroy medical waste is incineration or combustion technology, one of which is fluidized bed combustion (FBC). In addition, the FBC technique can also reduce hydrocarbon gases resulting from combustion so as to reduce dioxins into the environment. The reduction in carbon gas during combustion is caused by the absorbent used as a bed material for fluidization process. This study used alumina sand bed material with variations in diameter of 0.2 mm, 0.5 mm, 0.8 mm and 1.1 mm. This research was conducted with an experimental approach method using a laboratory scale FBC reactor and modeling using the Barracuda Virtual Reactor Computational Particle Fluid Dynamics (CPFD) software simulation. The results of this study indicate that alumina sand with a diameter of 0.2 mm has ability to capture more carbon than other sand diameter variations. Based on the simulation, the variation of the 0.2 mm diameter also shows the best solid mixing results due to the relationship between the fluidization movement of the bed material in the reactor and the bed material's ability to reach the highest up to 50 cm from the bottom of the reactor in the 60th second simulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]