Biomass Combustion Basics

 
 
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 Biomass combustion is a concept as old as they come. Making a campfire to keep warm or cook food is one example. Using a wood burning furnace, stove or boiler for the same purposes is another.

But in the modern sense at a commercial scale, biomass combustion is a sophisticated area of equipment and technology, geared toward energy efficiency and low emissions.

Most biomass combustion systems have been designed to handle wood and wood residues, but more are now coming on stream that can handle agricultural biomass, either independently or in a system built to handle different types of biomass.

Variety of scale and systems
There is a range of scale in biomass combustion systems. Some large biomass combustion plants have been implemented by municipalities, bio-energy companies and large commercial enterprises, both for on site use or for supplying energy off site. Smaller systems have been adopted by a range of commercial facilities for on site use, often specially designed to handle byproducts produced by those operations or by nearby industries.

Whatever the system – from a simple furnace or boiler to multicomponent, large scale sophisticated equipment – the process centres around several key steps: feeding biomass into the system either manually or automatically, burning the biomass in some form of combustion chamber, capturing the heat and filtering the emissions, and then distributing the heat.

In some systems, the biomass used may be in raw form. This is more common using wood material, which is relatively consistent, or in situations where the system uses by-products produced on site and is designed to handle raw forms. But for less consistent materials or those supplied or sold commercially to external facilities, processing is more common, with the typical preferred forms being chips or pellets.

Most biomass combustion systems are designed to burn a single type of biomass, but some can be used or adjusted to burn multiple forms. Some also allow biomass to be co-fired with another fuel, such as coal.

Ultimately, the process of biomass combustion can be used to convert the biomass into many forms of useful energy including hot air, hot water, steam and electricity.

Opening the door for agriculture
To date, biomass combustion systems designed for and implemented in commercial facilities have focused heavily on using forest industry biomass resources such as wood and wood residues.

However, research, technology advances and increasing interest in recent years has opened the door to greater opportunity for using agricultural biomass.

Europe has lead the way, with a substantial number of agricultural operations either implementing biomass combustion systems or supplying biomass in various forms for external facilities and markets.

Now there is rising interest in North America for adopting similar technologies and approaches for biomass combustion, and Canadian agriculture has the potential to provide a good fit for this option.

 
 
 
 
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For more information about the content of this document, contact Kelly Lund.
This document is maintained by Laura Thygesen.
This information published to the web on November 23, 2015.