The Biomass 2013 project aimed, on the one hand, to respond to the need to identify and make available to operators in the sector innovative technological solutions for solving plant problems or for exploiting the energy potential of biomass, and, on the other hand, to provide institutional and non-institutional stakeholders with technical support for solving environmental problems related to the production of electricity from biomass and for promoting it as a renewable energy source.
The main products and results of the project, in the second year of a three-year research process, can be summarized as follows, with reference to the different themes on which the research activity was based:
– comparative life cycle study of bioenergy supply chains of national interest and translation of impacts into an aggregate sustainability indicator using external cost evaluation methodology;
– experimental characterization of the effects of thermochemical pretreatment (torrefaction) of agro-industrial residues for energy use (biofuel) and investigation of the operational/cost problems associated with the application of existing torrefaction technologies in production scale plants;
– functional improvement of the RSE LOOP test facility (device that simulates emissions from combustion processes by metrologically controlled addition of specific compounds) and its use for intercomparison with national stakeholders (ISPRA, Regional Environmental Protection Agencies, Utilities) on methods to measure pollutants in emissions;
– construction of a pilot plant for biogas-to-biomethane upgrading based on the solid phase amine technology developed by RSE;
– long-term validation test, carried out in an operational waste-to-energy plant, of the monitoring system developed by RSE, based on the use of a passive multi-material probe and a resistive probe for on-line measurement of corrosion.