Immediate measurement of fuel characteristics of bio-char using NIRS

Low temperature pyrolysis is effective to improve the fuel quality of wheat straw and corn stover. To determine the pyrolysis condition and fully utilizing the solid product (bio-char), the fuel characteristics of the bio-char should be measured. It costs a lot of time and money to finish all the measurement, which really retards the development of the biomass industry. This study is supposed to immediately predict the proximate analysis parameters, ultimate analysis parameters and heat value of sixty-five bio-char using NIRS. The results show the fuel characteristics of the bio-char vary in a very big range. The NIRS models can predict the VM, FC, ash, HHV, oxygen, carbon, hydrogen contents of the bio-char accurately. The Rc and Rcv2 value are all bigger than 0.92 and the RPD are bigger than 3.59. The NIRS models can also tell the high or low content of moisture and nitrogen. Only for the sulphur, more work need to do to improve the accuracy of the NIRS models. Predicting the fuel characteristic of the bio-char only by scanning the NIR spectrum, which costs only 10 seconds, will really be helpful for the biomass industry.