Process modelling of municipal solid waste gasification with non-thermal plasma tar-cracking unit for mass and energy recovery

Growing municipal solid waste generation continues to outpace conventional disposal methods, and while gasification can turn waste into a synthetic gas, tar formation limits this gas mainly to combustion. Non-thermal plasma tar cracking can remove tar, but it has mainly been demonstrated at bench scale, with limited investigation of its integration into waste gasification systems. It was hypothesised that linking a gasification flowsheet to a regression model of non-thermal plasma tar cracking would reveal the trade-off between syngas quality and energy demand. A process model combining waste gasification with a non-thermal plasma tar cracking unit, represented using a multilinear-regression surrogate derived from plasma simulations, was built and tested across six pathways. The flowsheet predicted a syngas of hydrogen (52.3 %), carbon monoxide (25.3 %), carbon dioxide (14.0 %), and methane (3.9 %), in agreement with previous work, and the regression model achieved species-dependent coefficients of determination of 66.94–94.66 %. Overall non-thermal plasma removed most tar but added 1.80–2.00 kW per kilogram of waste, favouring methanol synthesis and fuel cells over conventional power generation.