A theoretical evaluation of the impact of the type of reaction on heat production and material losses in biomass piles

Self-heating during storage of biomass in piles causes material losses, leads to emissions to air, and poses a risk of fire. There are different techniques to assess a biomass material's propensity for self-heating, some of these are briefly reviewed. One of these techniques is isothermal calorimetry, which measures thermal power from materials and produces time-resolved curves. A recently developed and published test standard, ISO 20049-1:2020, describes how the self-heating of pelletized biofuels can be determined by means of isothermal calorimetry and how thermal power and the total heat produced during the test should be measured by isothermal calorimetry. This paper supports interpretation of the result obtained by isothermal calorimetry; the mentioned standard provides examples of peak thermal power and total heat but does not provide any assistance on how the result from isothermal measurements should be interpreted or how the result from measurements on different samples could be compared. This paper addresses the impact of different types of reactions, peak thermal power, total heat released (heat of reaction), activation energy, heat conductivity, and pile size on the temperature development in a generic pile of biomass. This paper addresses important parameters when the result from isothermal calorimetry is evaluated. The most important parameter, with respect to temperature development in large piles, was found to be the total heat released. It was also proposed that safe storage times, that is, the time until a run-away of the temperature in the pile, could be ranked based on the time to the peak thermal power.