Study on the effects of storage conditions on pretreated and raw biomass

Abstract

This study aims to investigate influential of the storage condition that affects biomass properties that are covering storages (covered and uncovered) of the torrefied and untorrefied pellets of wood and corncob pellets. And the properties of the pellet after storage for 6 months consist of higher heating value (HHV), moisture content, durability, and dry matter loss. The result shows that the torrefied (wood and corncob) pellets have higher HHV than untorrefied pellets around 15-30%. For the moisture content, the covered pellets have less moisture content than uncovered approximately 3% for both (wood and corncob pellets). Furthermore, the durability continuously decreases from start to 6 months until the durability of corncob black wood and corncob pellet decrease around 95.2% in the case uncovered while in the covered case of wood and corncob, the durability decline around 7.4% and 4.1% respectively. To sum up, the experiment demonstrates that piling a pellet under dry conditions (or covering the pellet to avoid moisture conditions) can upgrade the HHV and energy density of the pellet and the quality of torrefied pellet is greater than untorrefied pellet as well as the wood pellet quality is also better than corncob in term of a low increasing rate of moisture content and dry matter loss and higher of durability, HHV and energy density.