Although the purchase price of cellulosic feedstocks is competitive with petroleum on an energy basis, the cost of lignocellulose conversion to ethanol using today's technology is high. Cost reductions can be pursued via either in-paradigm or new-paradigm innovation. As an example of new-paradigm innovation, consolidated bioprocessing using thermophilic bacteria combined with milling during fer...

PROCESS AND TECHNOLOGY STATUS – Combustion boilers are widely used to generate steam for industrial applications and power generation. While all kinds of energy sources fossil fuels, biomass, nuclear and solar energy, electricity can be used to generate heat and steam, the scope of this brief is limited to combustion boilers using fossil fuels and biomass. Boilers can be grouped into two broad ...

The objective of the study is to analyse the conditions for connection of residential buildings in heat sparse areas to district heating systems in order to increase electricity production in municipal combined heat and power plants. The European electricity market has been assumed to be fully deregulated. The relation between connection of heat sparse areas, increased electricity and heat prod...

The current electricity demand is increasing, and now the government has involved third parties in the implementation of electricity so that investors compete in building infrastructure in order to apply electricity. Thermal power is one source that has a fast break event point compared to other resources that more interested investors even with all forms of pollution caused. A form of heat pow...

This paper is to seek effective scheme of boiler efficiency optimization, it uses Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm to optimize boiler efficiency based on the model of boiler combustion efficiency. First, an optimization model of boiler efficiency, which takes boiler efficiency function as optimization objective, is set up according to the heat loss of boiler combustion. Moreover, the opera...

The pulp and paper industry has a great opportunity to take advantage of the experience about forestry and wood handling for production of renewable fuels, chemicals and materials. Residues from forestry, i.e., tops, branches and stubs, have great potential to become a raw material that can replace crude oil or natural gas in many applications. By constructing a gasification-based production fa...

The study deals with an emergy evaluation of the supply of electricity and heat to a large user, namely a public hospital in Northern Italy. We performed firstly a conventional LCA evaluation, in order to identify and quantify the material and energy flows involved in three cogeneration alternatives for the hospital. The evaluated cogeneration alternatives were: 1) an Internal Combustion Engine...

We update a previously presented Linear Programming (LP) methodology for estimating state level costs for reducing CO2 emissions from existing coal-fired power plants by cofiring switchgrass, a biomass energy crop, and coal. This paper presents national level results of applying the methodology to the entire portion of the United States in which switchgrass could be grown without irrigation. We...

When evaluating residential energy systems like co-generation systems, hot water and electricity demand profiles are critical. In this paper, the authors aim to extract basic time-series demand patterns from two kinds of measured demand (electricity and domestic hot water), and also aim to reveal effective demand patterns for primary energy saving. Time-series demand data are categorized with a...