Diesel and wood combustion are major sources of carbonaceous particles in the atmosphere. It is very hard to distinguish between the two sources by looking at soot particle morphology, but clear differences in the chemical structure of single particles are revealed by C(1s) NEXAFS (near edge X-ray absorption fine structure) microspectroscopy. Soot from diesel combustion has a dominant spectral ...

Atmospheric particulate matter can be strongly affected by smoke from biomass combustion, including wildfires, prescribed burns, and residential wood burning. Molecular source tracer techniques help determine contributions of biomass smoke to particle concentrations if representative source profiles are available. Various wood smoke source profiles have been generated for residential wood burni...

The high lung cancer rate in Xuan Wei, China, is associated with smoky coal use in unvented homes, but not with wood or smokeless coal use. Smoky coal combustion emits higher polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) concentrations than wood combustion. This study used DNA adducts as biomarkers for human exposure to PAH from combustion emissions. DNA adducts were determined by enzyme-linked immunos...

For this study, we categorized waste from railroad operation into seven types; i.e., wood, vinyl, fiber, Styrofoam, food, paper and plastic. We then performed a combustion test using a cone calorimeter that is used widely for evaluating the combustion properties of combustible materials, to evaluate the heat release rate, smoke production rate, carbon monoxide production, carbon dioxide product...

This study focuses on modelling and simulation of horizontal moving bed/grate wood chip combustor. A standalone finite volume based 2-D steady state Euler-Euler Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) model was developed for packed bed combustion. Packed bed combustion of a medium scale biomass combustor, which was retrofitted from wood log to wood chip feeding for Tea drying in Sri Lanka, was evalu...

The effect of basic magnesium carbonate (BMC), magnesium hydroxide (MH), and magnesium chloride hydrate (MCH) on thermal degradation of red gum wood was studied using cone calorimetry, Thermogravimetric-differential scanning calorimetry (TG-DSC) analysis, and X-ray diffraction (XRD) characterization. The results showed common fire retardation actions of the three compounds by releasing incombus...

Dendromass remains the largest biomass energy source today. Dendromass has a lot of advantages in comparison with fossil fuels. One important benefit is reduced SO2 and NOx formation through a decrease in fuel bound sulfur and nitrogen respectively. One of applications of dendromass are wood pellets. Using of additives can affect some properties of wood pellets include combustion and production...

In the next ten years the amounts of waste wood impregnated with Cu, Cr and As (CCA) is expected to increase dramatically world wide. CCA has been widely used for wood preservation since the early 1950s and because the fixation of CCA in the wood is good, the concentration of CCA is still high, when the wood is at the end of service. In some countries e.g. Denmark and Norway, the use of As for ...

Due to relatively high concentrations of Cd, biomass combustion fly ashes often fail to meet Danish legislative requirements for recycling as fertilizer. In this study, the potential of using electrodialytic remediation for removal of Cd from four different biomass combustion fly ashes was investigated with the aim of enabling reuse of the ashes. The ashes originated from combustion of straw (t...

Southern yellow pine wood chips were used as the feedstock for a pilot-scale gasification unit coupled with a 25 kW generator. The pulp-grade wood chips were relatively free of bark and low in ash content. Processing this feedstock yielded a black/sooty byproduct that upon combustion in a muffle furnace resulted in an ash content of about 48%. The term ―char ash‖ was coined to account for the t...