The areas of work and specific objectives on which the project worked during the year are:

Waste-to-energy

• Characterization of municipal waste production and national MBT and W-t-E facilities: implementation of multi-year databases set up in the previous year
• Life Cycle Costing of the national waste-MBT-SRF-energy supply chain: identification of methodology, case studies, and plant-specific data needed for further development of the analysis
• Life Cycle Assessment of the national waste-MBT-SRF-energy supply chain: state of the art and identification of the main relevant issues for the subsequent implementation phase of the analysis
• Legislation:annual scientific contribution to the work of national (CTI) and international (CEN; ISO) committees working on technical standardization pertaining to energy recovery from waste and solid recovered fuels (SRF)
• International Activities: annual scientific contribution to studies and dissemination activities promoted by IEA Bioenergy Task 36 on technological and governance (support to decision makers) aspects pertaining to using waste for energy

Bio-hydrogen and bio-products from agro-industrial residues

• Bio-products from rice husk residue: experimental investigation on the recovery, from the residue, of a commercially valuable product, γ-oryzanol, by supercritical CO2 extraction
• Bio-H₂ from rice husk residue: first step of experimentation on the producibility of the energy vector hydrogen from residue, by fermentation (dark fermentation), blended with digestate from animal wastewater treatment

Biogas-to-biomethane upgrading

• Biogas-to-biomethane upgrading technology: Upgrading with solid-phase sorbent: completion of experimental testing and start of field validation, on RSE BioMetUp pilot plant, of zeolite solid sorbent performance
• Legislation: scientific contribution to the annual activities of national (IGC) and international (CEN) committees working on the technical standardization of biomethane and its feed-in
• National Activities: scientific contribution to the annual work of the technical table on biomethane convened by the Lombardy Region

Combustion of agricultural reside biomass

• Technology for direct combustion of corn stover bales:design with stakeholdersof a pilot plant that includes a biomass pre-treatment device to make the combustion stage more efficient
• Modeling simulations: launch of the performance simulation of a fire tube boiler, to which the designed bale burning system will be functionally connected
• Energy usability of other types ofagricultural residue: deeper study into the availability and energy usability (distributed generation plants) of vine shoots from the ordinary maintenance of wine-growing crops.

Pollutant emissions from biomass plants

• Formaldehyde emissions: experimental validation campaign on real gas samples of emissions measurement methods (EPA 323, spectrophotometric; VDI 3862-2, HPLC)
• Conventional pollutants in emissions: analysis of application issues of standardized methods to the specific case of small-medium size biomass plants
• Pollutant emission abatement technology: preliminary design of an innovative combined flue gas treatment device (particulate and NOx) and techno-economic feasibility assessment
• Legislation: scientific contribution to the annual activities of national (UNI) and international (CEN, ISO) committees active in the technical standardization of emissions and air quality measurement methods
• National Activities: completion, at RSE’s Loop test facility, of comparison campaigns on measurements of pollutants in gaseous emissions (project sponsored by ISPRA); final joint evaluation of findings.