Production and Characterization of Cardboard Biochar using a Commercial Gasifier
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Biochar has been suggested for use in many applications such as soil amendment, long-term carbon storage and use in batteries as an electrode. Certain applications require a particular set of traits thereby necessitating the careful selection of production parameters to meet the end user’s needs. This research aimed to produce biochar using a Micro Auto Gasification Systems (MAGS) provided by Terragon Environmental Technologies (Montreal, Canada) then conduct physical, chemical and biological characterization. The MAGS’ operating procedure was adapted to increase the carbon content of the charred product and qualify it as biochar, as per the International Biochar Initiative (IBI) and European Biochar Certificate (EBC) standards. The production of biochar occurred at three equivalence ratios (ER) of 0.15, 0.2 and 0.25. The ER was used due to the coupled nature of the temperature and oxygen control in MAGS. Approximately 3.0 kg of shredded cardboard was loaded into the MAGS and the desired airflow was adjusted to meet the ERs. Airflow controllers within the MAGS exhibited a slow response time thus caused difficulties in attaining the desired ERs, only reaching: 0.14, 0.17 and 0.20, respectively. The residence time was held constant at 16 minutes (min) and the cooldown time was held constant at 20 hours (h) . The biochar yield decreased with increasing ER. With an equivalence ratio of 0.2, the ash content spiked relative to the other two operating conditions (57.76% d.b. @ 105 °C compared to 29.85% and 31.28% for target ER = 0.15 and 0.25, respectively). This could be due to poor mixing in the gasification chamber and poor control of the cooldown conditions, whereby excess heat and air exposure could have caused spontaneous combustion of char. The higher ash content in this treatment likely contributed to the sample’s lower specific surface area of 7.22 m2kg-1, compared to 17.01 m2kg-1 and 22.70 m2kg-1 for target ER = 0.15 and 0.25, respectively. The heavy metal concentrations were within the IBI and EBC guidelines. A germination study was performed and no evidence was found to indicate that the biochar had phytotoxic effects on the germination of Lactuca sativa cv. Green Towers M.I. (romaine lettuce). The application rate of 3% and 5% mass/mass had statistically significantly higher germination rate, shoot dry mass and shoot length than 1% (p=0.05). Based on the results, the type of biochar (ER = 0.15, 0.2, 0.25) had no significant effect on the studied germination parameters. The biochar produced in this thesis is thus suitable for use as a soil amendment
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
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.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".