Life is hinged on energy and a good and sustainable source is the penultimate desire of all nations. Now faced with the impending decline in the oil reserves, attempts have been and are being made to control the use. Yet beyond all the control strategies, the time approaches when the world supply will become inadequate. The very high rate of regeneration of grasses, weeds and leaves shows that it will be environmentally friendly to use as fuel, for the carbon dioxide that will be released when they are burnt will be required for their regeneration. In this study, attention is focused on designing a burner to combust these materials in an industrial setting. The result shows that the temperature profile for pulverized lower grade biomass fuel rises slowly and tends to stabilize at 438˚C. It was also discovered that the cost of a heating process can be drastically reduced as it costs $8 when using the cooking gas and $4.66 when using the mixture of the new fuel and cooking gas. Thus by using this new fuel or a mixture of it, not only will the cost of heating processes be reduced, but also the life of the existing known conventional resources will be prolonged.
Fossil fuels are currently the driving force behind the industrialized and developing economies and they have continued to dominate the energy market; with oil contributing about 41.3%, gas about 22.4%, coal about 26.1% while the contribution of hydro, nuclear and other minor out-crops amount to about 10.3%. However, the fossil fuels are not only exhaustible; they are already showing signs of depletion. This work identifies a number of highly regenerative grasses, weeds, leaves; farm and forest wastes as an alternative source of renewable energy. The potentialities of the materials as viable energy resources were investigated by determining their combustion characteristics. A burner was constructed and tested by using it to boil a given quantity of water under comparable conditions with other burners. The results showed that the commercial briquette burner boiled the water in 19 minutes, the domestic gas cooker in 18 minutes, the kerosene stove in 30 minutes and the fire place in 30 minutes. The cost estimates of boiling the given quantity of water were also determined. While it cost $0.313 using gas, $0.125 using kerosene, $0.063 using wood, it cost a meagre $0.006 to boil the same quantity of water using this alternative renewable energy resource in the designed and constructed burners. One can, therefore, conclude that while biomass may not be able to meet the energy needs of the nation, it can, however, act as a major complimentary energy resource.
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