Investigating the Efficient Use of Municipal Solid Waste for Energy Production in West Africa: Case Study of Lomé, Togo

Résumé

Waste to Energy (WtE) projects and technology development around the world seem to be an urgent appeal to address environmental pollution issues caused by municipal solid waste (MSW) and contribute to mitigating the energy crisis. Although the least developed countries, especially from Africa, have made efforts to improve MSW management and upscale WtE projects, there is still a lack of knowledge, understanding, and research on WtE facility siting, MSW generation and composition, and technology adoption, regardless of local conditions. Therefore, this thesis aims to investigate a new approach to WtE facility siting, explore MSW generation forecasting and related dynamic patterns with artificial intelligence tools, understand its composition and calorific content, and assess the syngas potential from combustible municipal solid waste (CMSW) under supercritical water gasification (SCWG) technology in the case study of Lomé. Hence, for suitable site selection, a method combining the Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process (FAHP) and location-allocation techniques was developed considering socio-cultural, environmental, techno-economic, territorial, and treatment technology factors. Also, the socio-economic, climatic, and Land Use Land Cover patterns were considered under the Integrated Gradient Long-and Short-terms Time series Network (LSTNet+IG) based models alongside conventional neural network models for MSW generation forecasting. Furthermore, the physical, proximate, and ultimate composition, calorific content, and ash composition from MSW were experimentally analyzed. Finally, the syngas potential from CMSW was evaluated by modeling and simulating the SCWG. As a result, two optimal sites were selected and assigned to gasification and anaerobic digestion technologies. The LSTNet+IG model outperformed others, with households and institutions being the major influencing feature. Moreover, there was a significant difference (p-value 1.90E–07 < 0.05) in seasonal waste composition with plastic and putrescible fractions indicating the highest and lowest calorific content as well as their synergistic and inhibitory effects, respectively. The silicon dioxide content was the highest among others with a maximum of 75.88 wt% on average from plastic owing to a high contamination of fines. Ultimately, plastic fraction achieved the highest high heating (42.98 MJ/kg) and low heating (38.30 MJ/kg) values, and greenhouse gas potential of 15.788 kg CO2 eq, owing to H2 and CH4 gas components of predicted syngas product.

Citer ce document

Accès au document

Ce document est hébergé sur son dépôt institutionnel d'origine.

Auteur(s)

Statistiques

Consultations : 2

Téléchargements : 0