The maintenance of life on earth, our food, oxygen, and fossil fuels depend upon the conversion of solar energy into chemical energy by biological photosynthesis carried out by green plants and photosynthetic bacteria. In this process sunlight and available abundant raw materials (water, carbon dioxide) are converted to oxygen and the reduced organic species that serve as food and fuel. A long-...

Biomass is material derived from living or recently living organisms and is a potential source of energy with very specific properties. Biomass has great potential to replace fossil fuels in energy systems, offering environmental benefits due to its carbon neutrality and renewability. However, the firing and co-firing of biomass can lead to problems such as slagging, fouling and metal corrosion...

Current dependence on fossil fuels to satisfy increasing energy needs has created an overabundance of CO2 emissions. This project aims to use a radio frequency (rf) plasma source to dissociate CO2 completely into solid carbon and gaseous oxygen to reduce CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. An rf plasma excited by a double helix antenna with an axial magnetic field is used to create the CO2 di...

Thermochemical conversion of non-edible biomass offers an efficient and economically process to provide valuable fuels and prepare chemicals derived from biomass in the context of developing countries. Pyrolysis has advantages over other thermochemical conversion techniques because it can convert biomass directly into solid, liquid and gaseous products by thermal decomposition of biomass in the...

Global and regional emission inventories of mercury are reviewed with special emphasis on the source regions with potential impact on the Arctic environment. These sources are located mostly in Eurasia and North America and emit almost 1300 t of rig to the air annually. Combustion of fossil fuels to produce electricity and heat is the major source of rig. Major portion of the element emissions ...

Trace metals are intrinsic, natural constituents of our environment. Apart from the natural sources, several anthropogenic ones also contribute to metal concentrations in the environment. Some of the anthropogenic sources of the metals in the environment are: mining, smelting, production and use of the compounds and materials containing the metals, burning of fossil fuels, waste dumping and lea...

Article history: Received 1 October 2006 Received in revised form 20May 2007 Accepted 20 June 2007 Co-combustion of chicken litter (CL) with coal was performed in a laboratory-scale fluidized bed combustor to investigate the effect of CL combustion on pollutant emissions. The emissions of major gaseous pollutants including CO, SO2, H2S and NO and temperature distribution along the combustor wer...

Interest in oxy-fuel combustion as one of the leading carbon capture technologies has grown significantly in the past two decades. Experimental studies have shown higher CO concentration in oxy-fuel diffusion flames than in traditional air-fuel flames of both gaseous and solid fuels. The higher CO concentration changes the flame profiles, and it may have impacts on pollutants formation. This pa...

The production of corn or soybeans for bio-based fuels and materials requires significant inputs of nitrogen (FN) and phosphorus fertilizer (FP) to increase grain yields. Approximately 50% of these nutrients are integrated into plant biomass. The remaining 50% is volatilized, leached into surface and groundwater, or transformed into gaseous species such as N2, NO, or N2O. Recent efforts to comp...

The objective of this study is to investigate the combustion in a pilot-ignited supercharged dual-fuel engine, fueled with different types of gaseous fuels under various equivalence ratios. It is found that if certain operating conditions are maintained, conventional dual-fuel engine combustion mode can be transformed to the combustion mode with the two-stage heat release. This mode of combusti...