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Content archived on 2024-06-18

Safety and quality assurance measures along the pellets supply chain

Objective

Isolated incidents due to increased, toxic emissions in pellet storages have aroused great relevance and urgency on operational and customer safety in wood pellet supply chains. Reportedly two cases of death have occurred in large size vessels for ocean transportation and in harbour facilities. Another three incidents were reported in end-users´ storage rooms, the last of which resulted in the death of a German engineer. Furthermore, measurements in pellet storages show significantly increased CO concentrations for a relevant number of storages. Until now a definitive cause for increased CO concentration could not be found.

Within this project the different approaches and results on safety in pellet supply chains are linked with each other and integrated to a supranational scope. This is of great importance as pellet markets are no longer isolated, but increasingly grow to international resource flows. In this regard, decisive parameters like the amount of off-gasses and the potential for self-heating related to the time from pellet production to end use as well as the raw material composition of pellets resulting from their origin have to be investigated within international scope.

The proposed project aims to answer the question, where and under which conditions off-gassing and self-heating from biomass pellets occurs and what measures can be undertaken to reduce these risks. In turn, this project will end out into a draft for setting an international standard on safety measures and inspection methods along the whole pellets supply chain (e.g. by developing Material Safety Data Sheets for wood pellets). This safety issue is decisive for the further extension of pellets markets and thereby reflects high relevance for all enterprises in the pellet utilisation chain.

Call for proposal

FP7-SME-2011
See other projects for this call

Coordinator

BEST - BIOENERGY AND SUSTAINABLE TECHNOLOGIES GMBH
EU contribution
€ 50 144,00
Address
INFFELDGASSE 21B
8010 Graz
Austria

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Region
Südösterreich Steiermark Graz
Activity type
Research Organisations
Administrative Contact
Walter Haslinger (Dr.)
Links
Total cost
No data

Participants (14)