Comparison of emission factors from biomass burning facilities

Abstract

Among different types of environmental imbalances, air pollution has been a global environmental and health issue with serious implications to both the surrounding and public health. One of the significant sources of atmospheric particles and gaseous pollutants is biomass burning. Even though biomass is the main source for alternative energy, this activity releases a large amount of air pollutants, which can cause serious effects on the ambient air quality, public health and climate. Emission of pollutants from biomass burning process and operation can be represented by emission factor. The interest of this paper is to compare the existing emission factors established for different type of biomasses. From the comparison, cereal waste gives the highest emission factor of PM (75±21g/kg), whereas the emission factor of element carbon emission rates being relatively higher from rice straw (57.7±27.9g/kg) and lower from wheat straw (0.42±0.23 g/kg). The emission factor of organic carbon is also considerably higher from rice straw burning (335.4±88.0 g/kg) and very much lower from Florida sugarcane burning (0.16±0.09 g/kg) wheareas corn stover had the highest emission factors of NO, NOx and CO2. Besides comparison of the established emission factors, the associated factors affecting the EFs establishment were also studied. Among the various factors with significant influence on the resulted emission factors are type of biomass, source of emission, condition of combustion (operating temperature and pressure), capacity of feedstock and Air Pollution Control (APC) system.