Justification of the Energy Use of Cedar Husk Waste as an Environmentally Friendly Additive for Co-Combustion with Coal

Abstract

In this paper, the properties of ignition of mixed fuel pellets formed on the basis of fairly typical energy coal and wood industry waste in the form of cedar husks are experimentally established. The technical characteristics of the initial fuel components and the mixtures based on them, the ignition delay times for different mass concentrations of biomass in coal, and the composition of flue gases formed during the thermal decomposition of these mixed fuels and their base components were determined. Pellets of mixed fuels were made by a hydraulic press. The experiments were performed in an air environment at temperatures from 600 °C to 800 °C. Recording of the processes of pellet ignition and combustion was carried out using a high-speed video camera with an image format of 1024 × 1024 pixels, and a frame rate up to 500 frames per second. The analysis of the flue gas composition was performed using a Test-1 factory gas analyzer (BONER Co.). It was found that the increase in the share of biomass up to 50% in the mixed fuel led to a significant reduction in the ignition delay time to less than 1 s and the sequestration of sulfur oxide emissions by 37.6% and of nitrogen oxides by 3.8% in the studied granular mixed fuels.