Determination of annual efficiency and emission factors of small-scale biomass boiler

Published 2011

Citation: Schwarz M, Heckmann M, Lasselsberger L, Haslinger W. Determination of annual efficiency and emission factors of small-scale biomass boiler, Central Europe Biomass Conference 2011, 26th-29th of January 2011, Graz, Austria.

Abstract

In the last decades certification tests of small-scale biomass systems have impressively shown the improvement of the state of the art. Though, steady state measurements represent results only foroptimal operation. In practice results differ due to varying operating conditions. Therefore, of a test stand measurement method to derive realistic annual system efficiencies and emission factors is developed. The method includes a heat loss model for thermal storages too. It can be used to test automatically fed biomass boiler, manually loaded biomass boilers and boiler / heat accumulator combinations. For the evaluation of the measurement data a calculation method based on mass flows was developed. The results of our experiments show that the newly developed method is a good tool to evaluate small-scale biomass boilers. With this method an easy and reliable instrument to determine annual system efficiencies and emission factors for realistic boiler operation is provided. The application of the method will prove that modern small-scale biomass combustion systems have the potential to significantly contribute to the reduction of air pollutants and to increase overall energy system efficiency.