Recent regulations of the European Community (2001/77/EC und 2009/29/EC) require operators of industrial incineration plants to report the amount of fossil CO2 emissions and the fraction of energy produced from biomass, respectively. Municipal solid waste, industrial waste, and solid recovered fuels processed out of them have been recognized as a source for energy recovery. Since these fuels generally consist of an unknown mixture of different organic materials, operates are interested in reliable and cost effective methods to determining the content of biogenic and fossil organic carbon.
Until now the standard methods to characterize mixed wastes have been the manual sorting, the selective dissolution method and the radiocarbon method. In the recent years the applicant and his colleagues have developed an alternative method, the so called balance method (BM), for calculating the content of fossil organic carbon, and the portion of electricity produced from renewable (biogenic) materials in waste by solving a set of equations. All data required for this approach are either available from literature or from operating data routinely measured in combustion plants. So far the application of the balance method has been limited to retrospectively characterizing the feed of waste to energy plants. In recent investigations of the applicant the balance method has been adapted, so that results of the elementary analysis (C, H, N, S, and O content of the fuel) have been instrumental in conjunction with data about the chemical composition of moisture-and-ash-free biogenic and fossil organic matter to determine the biomass content of defined fuels mixtures.
Hence the aim of the proposed project is to validate the adapted balance method (aBM) by further experiments with defined mixtures of biogenic and fossil organic matter. In addition it is planned to apply the method to 3 different types of refuse derived fuels RDF, in order to test the practical applicability of the approach. Finally comparative analyses of the biomass content of RDF samples will be conducted using the selective dissolution method and the radiocarbon method:
In the frame of project the following research question will be addressed:
1. Is the adapted balance method (already tested against defined fuels mixtures) appropriate to determine the biomass content of “real” RDF, and which modifications are probably necessary?
2. How should the fuels samples be taken and conditioned in order to to obtain representative results?
3. Which variations in the chemical composition of moisture-and-ash-free biogenic and fossil organic matter in refused derived fuels are to be considered?
4. How does the aBM perform in comparison to standardized analyses methods?
The results of the project will give on the one hand valuable information about the potentials and limitations of the balance method. On the other hand criteria (e.g., regarding sample conditioning, amount of analysis samples, data analysis) for a standardized application of the balance method will be provided.
