Biomass moisture analysers-the latest solutions

摘要

Biomass production and testing has become more important as the world is focusing more on bio energy and biomass industries. There is a need to measure, monitor and control moisture content of biomass material from the raw material field, transport, production plants to final quality. The standard method to test the biomass moisture is to do a manual oven dry test in the laboratory oven. The biomass sample weights are used before the drying, as well as after the drying to calculate the moisture content. The method has some major issues that often make it impractical to use. There is a long drying time e.g. 24 hours, it can only test a very small sample size, it is not very easy to use in field work and it also requires human labour and activity. There are many technologies available for material moisture content measurements; such as attenuation to radioactivity, conductivity, capacitance and various microwave and optical instruments. Often they have limitations in their performance or have other issues like reliability, safety or a high installation costs. As biomass application are quite different compared with typical moisture analyser applications such as fabric, pulp, paper etc., suppliers have required the development of new measuring methods and devices to overcome new challenges: such us large wood chips, bark, peat, solid waste, uneven moisture distribution and mixed content of the bio material.