Determining the Feasibility and Viability for Utilization of Agricultural Waste as Industrial Fuel.

Abstract

Burning of agricultural biomass residue, or Crop Residue Burning (CRB) has been identified as a major health hazard. These waste hay material is burnt after harvest season, because it has no further utility. A system needs to be designed which will minimize the crop related pollution, utilize these waste hay material and at same time provide incentives to farmer for the same.

A significant percentage of crop related biomass is burnt in India every year. In harvest season of 2017, 35 million tonnes of hay material had been confirmed as burned. These crop burning exposes nearby cities to extremely high levels of hazardous particulate matter (concentration), it is also a primary regional source of pollution, contributing between 12 and 60 per cent of PM concentrations. This burning caused record increase in the amounts of PM2.5 concentration. In addition, crop burning causes loss of vital components such as nitrogen, Sulphur, phosphorus and potassium from the topsoil layer.

To overcome the undertaken research problem, this work aims to study an alternative use of the crop waste that is burnt annually, by utilizing it as a combined fuel source with conventional fuel for power plants. However, to account for the large difference in calorific values, increasing the gross calorific value (GCV) of the biomass fuel is necessary, and has been done with various agents like kerosene, Octanol, vegetable/cooking oil and cow dung. Various other parameters like fixed carbon content and the compressed bulk density have also been measured, and have been used to recommend the optimal mix for usage, as well as a potential location to initiate further experiments. The method being followed to use crop waste as co-firing fuel is to firstly, collect the waste hay material from farmers which will provide them some incentives to not burn the waste material. Thereafter, moister has to be removed from the waste material and finally it is pelletized with various chemically prepared and natural agents for analyzing and increasing its GCV.

The above mentioned method is operated on four highly cultivated crops (Soya bean, Wheat, Pigeon pea, and Chickpea) with varied concentration of weight for hay material and volume for chemical agents. Thickness of pellets is fixed in 5-10mm range. Thereafter, this pellets are evaluated for moisture content, fixed carbon content, ash content, volatile matter, bulk density and finally GCVs of samples. The data is generated for four mentioned crops by varying there weight concentration with the external chemical agents to get optimized set of values, so the whole process can be made feasible to get high GCVs. The results showed that wheat+cooking oil (10%), extremely dried chickpea, soya bean and pigeon pea pellets are best co-firing fuel having 4460 and 4820 Kcal/Kg respectively. Further for future works, experimentation data can be feed to machine learning and classifiers cluster synced optimization algorithm to get an optimized feasible GCV for input variables moisture content, fixed carbon content, ash content, volatile matter, bulk density and weight ratio (waste hay/chemical agent) parameters.