Rapid Determination of Wood and Rice Husk Pellets’ Proximate Analysis and Heating Value

Xiaodan Liu, Xuping Feng, Lingxia Huang and Yong He
Additional contact information
Xiaodan Liu: College of Biosystems Engineering and Food Science, Zhejiang University, 866 Yuhangtang Road, Hangzhou 310058, China
Xuping Feng: College of Biosystems Engineering and Food Science, Zhejiang University, 866 Yuhangtang Road, Hangzhou 310058, China
Lingxia Huang: The Rural Development Academy, Zhejiang University, 866 Yuhangtang Road, Hangzhou 310058, China
Yong He: College of Biosystems Engineering and Food Science, Zhejiang University, 866 Yuhangtang Road, Hangzhou 310058, China

Energies, 2020, vol. 13, issue 14, 1-13

Abstract: Biomass pellets are a potential renewable and clean energy source. With the advantages of perfect combustion performance and easy storage and transport, biomass pellets have gradually replaced fossil fuels and become widely used. Rapid and accurate determination of biomass pellets’ quality is critical to efficient energy use. Laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) combined with chemometric methods were utilized. The gross calorific value (CV) and ash content (Ash), volatile matter (VM) and fixed carbon (FC) were firstly measured and analyzed. LIBS spectra and their corresponding elements of biomass pellet samples were analyzed. Three quantitative analysis models for quality indexes including partial least-squares regression (PLSR), least squares-support vector machines (LS-SVM), extreme learning machines (ELM) were further built. All models performed well, especially the LS-SVM model which obtained the best determination results, with all R 2 values over 0.95. Concurrently, the modeling performance of ash was slightly better than that of the other three quality indexes, which further confirmed the feasibility of using relevant elements to predict biomass quality indexes. The overall results indicated that LIBS coupled with suitable chemometrics could be an alternative promising method to determine quality indexes of biomass pellets and further improve energy utilization by using biomass materials with better quality.

Keywords: biomass pellet; laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy; chemometrics; quality indexes (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/13/14/3741/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/13/14/3741/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jeners:v:13:y:2020:i:14:p:3741-:d:387224

Access Statistics for this article

Energies is currently edited by Ms. Agatha Cao

More articles in Energies from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().