Jasmine (Jasminum sambac (L.) Ait.) flowers, valued for their fragrance and essential oils, are extensively used in the flavor, cosmetics, and pharmaceutical industries. However, their useful life is short due to rapid color degradation and browning caused by photo-oxidative stress induced by environmental factors like light, temperature, and humidity. Therefore, the significant reduction in the visual appeal, quality, and economic value necessitates the measurement of temporal color degradation to evaluate the shelf life for jasmine flowers. A developed open-source ImageJ plugin program quantified the color degradation of jasmine petals and pedicles over 25 h. Petal area (>19 mm2) cutoff separated the pedicles. Color degradation kinetics models, including zeroth-order, first-order, exponential decay, Page, and Peleg, using several color indices, were developed, and their performances were evaluated. VEG, hue, chroma, COM, and CIVE color indices were found suitable for kinetics modeling. Peleg and Page models (R2≥0.99) are suitable for petals and pedicles, respectively. Jasmine petals retained their color integrity for longer periods than pedicles. This study underscores the potential of computer vision analysis and kinetic modeling for evaluating flower quality after harvest. The color degradation dynamics were accurately characterized by the kinetic models, which provide actionable insights for optimizing storage and handling practices.

Agricultural residues serve as a vast yet underutilized biomass resource with significant potential for bioenergy and biomaterial applications. Converting these residues into densified biomass pellets enhances energy density, handling efficiency, and transportability, offering a sustainable alternative to conventional feedstocks. While extensive research has focused on woody biomass, studies on the pelletization of vegetable crop foliage remain limited. This study examines the pelletability of foliage from corn, soybean, tomato, eggplant, cucumber, and summer squash, assessing their physical properties, bulk durability, bulk density, and energy consumption during pelletization. Results demonstrated that variation in biomass composition significantly influences pellet quality, with lignin content improving durability and ash content affecting moisture uptake and combustion properties. Cucumber had the highest pellet density (691.2 kg/m3) and durability (97.9%), making it suitable for long-term storage and transport. Sawdust exhibited the lowest moisture absorption (16–18% db), which is attributed to its highest lignin content. Pelletization energy requirements varied significantly, with cucumber (21.8 kWh/t) and summer squash (18.7 kWh/t) requiring the lowest energy input, whereas soybean (49.6 kWh/t) and sawdust (47.3 kWh/t) exhibited the highest energy demands due to greater resistance to densification. A predictive model was developed to correlate single pellet density and durability with bulk pellet properties—yielding high predictive accuracy, with R2 = 0.936 for bulk density (BDe) and R2 = 0.861 for bulk durability (BDu)—thereby facilitating process optimization for large-scale pellet production. This study demonstrated that foliage residues from greenhouse crops, such as cucumber and summer squash, can be effectively pelletized with low energy input and high physical integrity. These outcomes suggest that such underutilized agricultural residues hold promise as a densified intermediate feedstock, supporting future applications in bioenergy systems and advancing circular resource use in controlled-environment agriculture.

The production of solid biofuels from torrefied biomass holds significant potential for renewable energy applications. Durable pellet formation from severely torrefied biomass is hindered by the loss of natural binding properties, yet studies on mild torrefaction that preserves sufficient binding capacity for pellet production without external binders or changes to die conditions remain scarce. This paper investigated the production of fuel pellets from torrefied biomass without using external binders or adjusting pelletization parameters. Experiments were conducted using a mild torrefaction temperature (230 °C and 250 °C) and shorter residence time (10, 15, and 30 min). The torrefied materials were then subjected to pelletization using a single-pellet press; and the influence of torrefaction on the mechanical durability, hydrophobicity, and fuel characteristics of the pellets was examined. Results indicated that the mass loss ranging from 10 to 20% among the mild torrefaction treatments was less than the typical extent of mass loss due to severe torrefaction. Pellets made from torrefied biomass (torrefied pellets) had improvement in the hydrophobicity (moisture resistance) when compared to pellets made from untreated biomass (untreated pellets). Improved hydrophobicity is important for storage and transportation of pellets that are exposed to humid environmental conditions, as it reduces the risk of pellet degradation and spoilage. Thermogravimetric analysis of the pyrolysis and combustion behaviour of torrefied pellets indicated the improvement of fuel characteristics in terms of a much higher comprehensive pyrolysis index and greater thermal stability compared to untreated pellets, as evidenced by the prolonged burnout time and reduced combustion characteristics index. Residence time had a more significant impact on pellet durability than temperature, but the durability of the torrefied pellets was lower than that of the untreated pellets. Further research is required to explore the feasibility of producing binder-free durable pellets under mild torrefaction conditions. Overall, the study demonstrated that mild torrefaction could enhance the fuel quality and moisture resistance of biomass pellets, offering promising advantages for energy applications, despite some trade-offs in mechanical durability.

The increasing demand for renewable energy has driven interest in utilizing agricultural residues for bioenergy applications. This study investigates the pelletization of foliage from six vegetable crops, including tomato, eggplant, summer squash, cucumber corn, and soybean, to assess their potential as bioenergy feedstocks. The physiochemical properties of these biomasses, including particle size and shape, lignin, and elemental composition, were analyzed to determine their impact on pellet density and durability. The results reveal significant variations in pellet quality across different biomasses. Cucumber and summer squash demonstrated the highest pellet densities (1.48–1.51 g/cm3) and superior durability (98.1% and 94.2%, respectively), making them the most promising candidates for pelletization. In contrast, eggplant exhibited the lowest density (1.14 g/cm3) and durability (47.2%), indicating poor pellet quality. The correlation between pellet durability and pellet density was positive and modest at r=0.647. The study further highlights the impact of inorganic elements on pellet properties, where the high silica and chlorine content of cucumber, summer squash, tomato, and eggplant reduced energy efficiency and increased ash-related challenges. The resulting color parameters analysis (L*, a*, and b*) shows that the pellets from eggplant, tomato, summer squash, and cucumber foliage are darker than pellets from sawdust, corn stover, and soybean residues.

Raw biomass (low bulk density) is converted to pellets (high bulk density) in several pellet depots. The distribution of these depots across the production area has impact of the total truck operating hours (raw biomass hauling to a depot + pellet hauling from the depot to the biorefinery) required to delivery feedstock for annual operation of the biorefinery. This study examines the distribution of depots across five production areas. The number of depots were 1, 2, and 4 depots per production area for a total of 5, 10, and 20 depots. Increasing from 5 to 10 reduced raw biomass hauling hours by 14% and increasing from 5 to 20 reduced these hours by 30%. Total hours (raw + pellets) were reduced less than 1% from 5 to 10 and about 11% from 5 to 20.

Biogenic ash is a significant impediment to the utilization of agricultural residues in biofuel production. Such challenge can be addressed by various treatments, as demonstrated in this study on the experimental and computational mechanisms involved in the hydrothermal treatment (HT) of wheat straw. A combination of classical (all-atom) molecular dynamics simulations of cellulose carrying silica and calcium species, along with first principles quantum chemical calculations, indicates the dissociation of inorganics from the cellulose with increased HT temperature. This observation is confirmed by experimental evidence of effective ash removal by HT, showing at least 50% removal of sulfur, chlorine, potassium, and calcium, and 12.5% of silica, leading to a reduced total ash content (from 6.7% to 4.2%). Changes in structural features upon HT, such as surface cellular structure and porosity, were revealed, accompanied by an increased specific surface area (from 1.17 to 6.34 m2/g). Our simulations suggest that silica binds tightly to the hydrophobic face of cellulose at room temperature, but HT significantly reduces the binding free energy of association with both hydrophobic and hydrophilic surfaces. Most significantly, ash removal leads to an increased calorific value, rising from approximately 16 MJ/kg to about 19 MJ/kg, along with improved thermal behavior. The improved integration combustion index parameter S indicates that the combustion properties improve with ash removal efficiency. The proposed atomic-level mechanism for the observed removal of inorganics during mild HT underscores the potential of such treatment in producing energy-dense wheat straw, a widely available agricultural residue.

Extensive research has been published on pelletizing severely torrefied biomass with the aid of binders, but limited studies have investigated the structural modifications of biomass during mild torrefaction. This study investigates the effects of several combinations of minimal torrefaction temperatures (230°C and 250°C) and relatively short durations (10, 15, and 30 minutes) on the thermophysical and molecular structure of the model woody biomass loblolly pine (Pinus Taeda) residues. The low severity treated biomass is compared with the untreated biomass and the biomass torrefied at 270°C for 30 minutes. Structural characterization methods include laser diffraction for particle size distribution and Brunauer-Emmett-Teller (BET) analysis to evaluate specific surface area. Additionally, FTIR, XRD, and TGA are used to assess changes in crystallinity and thermochemical composition. The woody residue torrefied at 250°C for 10 minutes exhibited a higher BET surface area (4.7 m²/g) than torrefied at 250°C for 15 minutes (3.5 m²/g). At a constant temperature of 250°C, the crystallinity index increases with the treatment duration, emphasizing the effect of time on retaining more hydroxyl groups that may act as binders for pelletization. This study demonstrates that minimizing the combination of torrefaction time and temperature can help control the degree of biomass molecular structure degradation thus minimizing overall mass loss, offering potential applications in the emerging biocarbon pellet industry.

Pulverizing is an essential unit operation in co-firing biomass with coal. Pulverizers are only compatible with pellet forms of fibrous biomass materials and crush them down to their original forming particle sizes. That is why the data on the size distribution of the particles forming a biomass pellet is crucial to achieving optimum combustion conditions. The current study determines the internal particle size distribution of pellets after wet disintegration, following ISO 17830 standard, and aims to suggest im-provements to the mentioned standard based on new measured evidence. Experiments were carried out on white wood pellets (no bark) and brown wood pellets containing bark at four water temperatures: 20, 40, 60, and 95 & DEG;C, with or without stirring. The particle size distribution of the pre-pelletizer wood particles was also measured and compared with particles in the formed pellets. Ambient water tem-perature of 20 & DEG;C was found to be adequate for the complete disintegration of pellets, and no mechanical stirring was required. About 30% of particles in the disintegrated pellets were 0.5-1.0 mm. Pelletization changes the particle size distribution to smaller particles. The disintegrated bark pellets contained more fines than white pellets.& COPY; 2023 Chinese Society of Particuology and Institute of Process Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Wood biomass is a crucial resource in the field of bioenergy. It is commonly used as a feedstock in bioenergy generation and biochemical production. However, to fully make use of the characteristics of distinct woody biomass, before delivering it to subsequent processing steps, it is necessary to classify and distinguish the different classes of wood biomass. Currently, companies tend to hire operators to carry out the classification task with the help of a digital inventory of biomass classes. However, operators require a great deal of training to correctly group the wood biomass into broad groups with relatively similar quality. Moreover, the judgment bias of operators and the small differences among materials, such as the visual similarity of shavings and sawdust, can lead to potential classification inaccuracy. Considering these challenges, it is inevitable to explore an alternative solution. Thanks to the low cost of the collection of digital images, this work proposes the use of deep neural networks to automatically and precisely classify images. However, this is a challenging task. Specifically, the discrimination in features among certain classes is small, especially with the involvement of some unexpected backgrounds. To address the challenge, compared with the traditional practice that a mere feature vector is extracted for an image, a feature extraction module is applied to produce sets of diverse feature vectors from a single image to explore more visual information. Self-attention mechanisms are intensively utilized in the stage of extraction. The effectiveness of the proposed method is experimentally shown in our collected data set. After a voting strategy is applied, the average accuracy of our method is 96.2%.

The present work provides a multiscale picture of the effect of a promising DES on biomass pretreatment by combining computational and experimental approaches.

Wood pellets are a versatile ingredient to produce bioenergy and bioproducts. Wood pellet manufacturing in Canada started as a way of using the excess sawdust from sawmilling operations. With the recent dwindling availability of sawdust and the growth in demand for wood pellets, the industry uses more non-sawdust woody biomass as feedstock. In this study, woody biomass materials received from nine wood pellet plants in British Columbia (BC) and Alberta were analyzed for their properties, especially those used for fractionating feedstock to make pellets. Half of the feedstock received at the plants was non-sawdust. Moisture contents varied from 10 to 60% wet basis, with the hog having an average of 50%. Ash contents ranged from 0.3 to 4% dry basis and were highest in the hog fraction. Bulk density varied from 50 to 450 kg/m3, with shavings having the lowest bulk density. Particle density ranged from 359 kg/m3 for infeed mix to 513 kg/m3 for sawdust. In total, 25% of particles received were larger than 25 mm. The extraneous materials (sand, dirt) in the infeed materials ranged from 0.03% to 1.2%, except for one hog sample (8.2%). Plant operators use mechanical fractionation and blending to meet the required ash content. In conclusion, further instrumental techniques to aid in fractionation should be developed.

Information on post-harvest handling of the crop is critical to the development of new or improved plant species and traits. This paper presents a comprehensive study of the grinding characteristics and handling properties of a number of crop residues under agronomic studies. We used a laboratory-scale knife mill connected to an in-line power meter to investigate the specific energy of size reduction for each crop. The summer squash sample yielded the smallest mean particle size upon grinding (P= 0.05). The results indicate a significant correlation between the Carbon to Oxygen (C/O) ratio and the Gross Calorific Value (GCV), ash, lignin content, and net specific grinding energy consumption (NSGEC) of the samples. Among agricultural residues, the soybean stalk sample, with the highest C/O ratio (0.96), exhibited the highest GCV (17.5 MJ/kg, db) and NSGEC (31.7 kWh/t), while the summer squash sample, with the lowest C/O ratio (0.46), showed the lowest GCV (13.6 MJ/kg, db) and NSGEC (5.1 kWh/t). The flowability of the ground biomass samples varied, with cucumber showing the best free flow properties. The results also showed that there is a significant positive correlation between the lignin content and NSGEC of all samples (p= 0.05).

The temperature experienced by reactants during preparation in a reactor is a key component in determining the yield and homogeneity of usable chemical products such as biomass particles. Thermocouples with sensors can be used to monitor spatial temperature gradients within reactors but these sensors are often too expensive and/or invasive. The present work proposes a strategy to identify optimal machine learning models to infer the maximum effective temperature experienced by particles during oxidative biomass torrefaction using key thermochemical combustion parameters. The maximum rate of weight loss, the corresponding temperature, and fixed carbon content on a dry‐ash‐free basis are used as literature‐based predictor variables obtained from thermogravimetric analysis. The evaluation of 24 machine‐learning models using the standard tenfold cross‐validation method suggests that the exponential Gaussian process regression (GPR) model is the most effective, followed by other GPR models. These high‐performing GPR models were also utilized to predict the effective preparation temperature distribution of reactor‐produced biomass particles under eight conditions of varying residence time and air‐to‐biomass ratio. The effective preparation temperature and residence time of individual biomass particles were then encoded into the torrefaction severity factor and used to estimate the energy yield of the reactor output as a novel quality control method. © 2023 The Authors. Biofuels, Bioproducts and Biorefining published by Society of Industrial Chemistry and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

A major use of residual biomass from forestry and agriculture is densification into biomass pellets. Laboratory-scale fuel pellet research involves data analysis and model building, often using a single pellet mechanical press to make the biomass pellets (mass < 1 g) at a slow production rate. However, this single pelletising approach is considered not practically possible to produce the mass of pellets (similar to 500 g) required for determining their mechanical durability in accordance with the ISO standard method (ISO 17831-1) adopted by industry. In this study, wood pellets were tested for single pellet durability in a single pellet durability tester. The first test was done to mimic the situation when wood pellets are exposed to humid environmental conditions during storage. It involved six treatments - three types of pellets and two levels of moisture content. The second test mimicked the situation when light rain may expose the pellets to liquid water during the loading and unloading of ships. The main objective was to develop a quantitative relationship between the tumbler durability Dt (industry standard) and Dsp the single pellet durability. Results showed that the variability of Dsp was much larger when single pellet durability had lower values. Dsp was found to be strongly correlated with Dt (R-2 = 0.94) when single pellet durability had high values. A linear equation can accurately convert Dsp to Dt when wood pellet moisture content is below 10% w.b. (c) 2023 IAgrE. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Various published data show the amount of crop residue available annually in India may range from a low of 90 to a high of 180 million tonnes. Different types of crop residue are collected from farmers depending on the geography and crop pattern for instance, in north India rice straw and cotton stalks are collected while in central India soya husk and sugarcane tops are collected. Baling and transporting straw from the field, though appear to be an option for safe disposal, will be feasible only when alternate, effective and economically viable usage methods are identified and facilities and infrastructure for ex-situ management methods are created. One immediate short term use of the residue is to replace 5% - 7% of the 670 million tonnes of coal India currently consumes to generate power. The farmers will benefit from the sale of their excess crop residue. The scheme will reduce pollution due to residue burning practices. Replacing coal will cut the GHG emissions. The challenge is to mobilize the crop residue collection and timely delivery to power plants. The data and calculations in this monogram show that it is economical for the farmer to remove the crop residue from the field quickly by using modern balers, to pelletize the biomass in small-scale distributed pellet plants, to store pellets in the modern steel bins and finally to deliver the pellets to coal plants by using rail transport. The delivered cost is estimated at around Rp 6.78/kg. The Government of India encourages the power plants to pay at least Rp 10/kg for the delivered biomass in the form of pellets. The current monogram analyzes the organization of an efficient supply chain in the State of Haryana India to ensure a sustainable modern enterprise.

This study investigates the economic feasibility of replacing propane with biomass (solid biofuels) for grain drying under four scenarios. Two scenarios are based on the recently increased price of propane and the possible future changes in prices for propane and biomass. The other scenarios assess the impact of two policies on the cost of energy when carbon pricing is included and a financial incentive program is designed to share the purchase and installation cost of clean technologies such as biomass burners. A farm business in Canada is used as the case study to compare and contrast the energy cost of drying wheat grain over the range of 160 000-400 000 bushels (4355-10 890 t) using wood chip or wood pellet burners instead of propane. The results indicate that, under all scenarios, biomass burners are a more economic option than propane burners for drying grain. In the baseline scenario (no carbon pricing/financial support), cost reductions of 34-62% can be achieved by using a wood chip burner instead of a propane burner. This reduction is estimated to be 52-58% for wood pellet burners versus the propane burner. Every $10tCO2e-1 increase in the carbon pricing adds about 1.7% to the total drying cost for the propane burner. This further increases the cost saving of switching from propane to biomass, as no carbon pricing is applied to biomass as a renewable energy source. A 50% cost sharing arrangement as a financial support to purchase and install biomass burners can provide a further 2-7% cost saving.

Soil amendment has recently been addressed as one of the promising applications of torrefied biomass, where the distribution of nutrients is a significant parameter of interest. The present study uses an x-ray fluorescence technique to elucidate the influence of torrefaction severity on the nutrient composition of biomass (e.g. rice husk). An increase in the extent of process severity leads to an enhancement in the fixed carbon content. Hence, the variation in nutrient composition is analyzed with respect to changes in the fixed carbon content. Results reflected that variation of nutrients with increasing fixed carbon content does not follow a uniform trend. It signifies the need for understanding the effect of process conditions, chemical forms, and interactions among the elements on the release of compounds containing nutrients. Enrichment of P, Fe, Mn and Zn, and reduction of K, Ca, S, Cl, Cu, Ni, Si, Sr, Ti, and Br have been observed in the solid product obtained after torrefaction. Concentration of Si followed K and P are maximum in all samples. K, Cl, S, and Br loss occurs significantly because of relatively lower stability in the torrefaction temperature range. The present findings would be helpful in selecting the conditions required to produce torrefied biomass to amend a specific soil type for a particular crop.