Combustion Characteristics of Biomass Residues and Biowastes: Fate of Fuel Nitrogen

Abstract

Biomass residues and wastes will have an important role in the future energy mix. Residues from agriculture or industrial processes are usually cheap, widespread, and continuously produced, and their heating value is comparable to that of wood. However, many of these materials are rich in proteins and, thus, nitrogen. Therefore, to be able to exploit these materials in an efficient way, fundamental research on their nitrogen chemistry is essential. In the work presented here, the release of gaseous compounds from five biomass residues from different processes was tested in a bench-scale single-particle reactor. The tested fuels were dry distiller’s grains and solubles (DDGS), palm kernel cake (PKC), rapeseed cake (RC), fermented sewage sludge (FSS), and chicken manure (CM). All of these materials have sufficiently high heating values and are either already used or projected to be used soon in industrial-scale boilers. The setup allowed us to study the total C and N release and the nitrogen partitioning be...