Assessing fire and explosion hazards in biomass: insights and emerging challenges

Abstract

Solid biofuels are one of the main energy industries, where fire and explosions have occurred during the last decades. This industry continues growing, however, the fundamental understanding of these materials is still limited and far from what is needed to ensure a safe working environment. A complete characterization of materials is essential to address this point, but a complete framework has not been developed. Different methodologies, testing parameters, testing equipment, etc. are used depending on the laboratory or the facilities. This lack of procedures introduces high uncertainties in the field, that are increased by the common idea of comparing results from different procedures without being consistently gathered. This problem has been detected when studying several characteristics of biomass: composition, particle size, particle shape, thermogravimetric analysis are examples of these situations. A complete review and the development of new standards to standardize the situation are pressing and should be addressed in the near future.