MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
Record W4376875352 · doi:10.1016/j.heliyon.2023.e16359

Techno-economic analysis of torrefied fuel pellet production from agricultural residue via integrated torrefaction and pelletization process

2023· article· en· W4376875352 on OpenAlex
Tumpa R. Sarker, Castaneda S. German, Venu Babu Borugadda, Venkatesh Meda, Ajay K. Dalai

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.
fundA Canadian funder is recorded on the work.

Bibliographic record

VenueHeliyon · 2023
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEngineering
TopicThermochemical Biomass Conversion Processes
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Saskatchewan
FundersNatural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of CanadaCanada Research ChairsBioFuelNet CanadaCRC Health Group
KeywordsTorrefactionPelletizingPelletsDiscounted cash flowRaw materialWaste managementEnvironmental scienceTonnePulp and paper industryBiomass (ecology)Cash flowProcess engineeringMaterials scienceEngineeringChemistryBusinessPyrolysis

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Torrefied pellets have gained more commercial importance due to their excellent performance in combustion, co-firing and gasification. The present investigation provides a conceptual design for torrefied fuel pellets production via combined torrefaction and pelletization technologies with and without additives. The entire design contains torrefaction unit, grinding, preparation of pellet formulation, pelletizing, and finally cooling of pellets. Two scenarios, scenario 1 (pelletization of torrefied biomass with additives) and scenario 2 (pelletization of torrefied biomass without any external additives) were tested and compared. The economic analysis suggests that both scenarios are profitable. Both scenarios were simulated using Aspen plus™, and economic feasibility was estimated using a complete cash flow analysis for a base case plant with 40,080 tonne/y capacity. For both cases, a discounted cash flow is a useful tool for estimating the minimal selling price for torrefied pellets as well as the capital investment, production cost and operating costs. The cost of the reactor used for torrefaction was found to be the most important component of combined torrefaction and pelletization system. The lowest selling price of generated torrefied pellets was found to be $103.4 and $105.1 per tonne at the plant gate for scenarios 1 and 2, respectively. Sensitivity analysis shows that, among all variable costs, labor cost has the highest influence on both net present value (NPV) and minimum selling price (MSP) in making pellets for both the scenarios. Furthermore, the internal rate of return was found to be25% and 22% at 10% discounted cash flow rate for scenarios 1 and 2, respectively. The framework that was created was found to lessen over-dependence on wood or fossil fuels and facilitate the promotion of bioenergy in rural areas.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Bench or experimental · Consensus signal: Bench or experimental
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.017
Threshold uncertainty score0.484

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.006
GPT teacher head0.201
Teacher spread0.195 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it