Volume and Mass Measurement of a Burning Wood Pellet by Image Processing

Abstract

Wood pellets are a form of solid biomass energy and a renewable energy source. In 2015, the new and renewable energy (NRE) portion of wood pellets was 4.6% of the total primary energy in Korea. Wood pellets account for 6.2% of renewable energy consumption in Korea, the equivalent of 824,000 TOE (ton of oil equivalent, 10 million kcal). The burning phases of a wood pellet can be classified into three modes: (1) gasification; (2) flame burning and (3) charcoal burning. At each wood pellet burning mode, the volume and weight of the burning wood pellet can drastically change; these parameters are important to understand the wood pellet burning mechanism. We developed a new method for measuring the volume of a burning wood pellet that involves no contact. To measure the volume of a wood pellet, we take pictures of the wood pellet in each burning mode. The volume of a burning wood pellet can then be calculated by image processing. The difference between the calculation method using image processing and the direct measurement of a burning wood pellet in gasification mode is less than 8.8%. In gasification mode in this research, mass reduction of the wood pellet is 37% and volume reduction of the wood pellet is 7%. Whereas in charcoal burning mode, mass reduction of the wood pellet is 10% and volume reduction of the wood pellet is 41%. By measuring volume using image processing, continuous and non-interruptive volume measurements for various solid fuels are possible and can provide more detailed information for CFD (computational fluid dynamics) analysis.

The Influences of Various Testing Conditions on the Evaluation of Household Biomass Pellet Fuel Combustion

“…On the other hand, the number of CO EFs using WBT version 4.2.3 were usually in the range of 10-50 g/kg [8,23,31]. This was because the Chinese testing sequence included a burnout phase at the end of the test when the remaining fuel was mainly charcoal [32]. Hot charcoal burning usually needed more air and a better air-fuel mix.…”

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“…2. Wood-Pellets production lines could be used as a solution to increase the Egyptian national income as the price of only one packed ton of wood pellets in the world market is between 220 $ and 369 $ [11], and the demand of wood pellets around the world is enormously rising (20.3 million tons in 2015) [12].…”

A Monocular Vision-Based Framework for Power Cable Cross-Section Measurement

“…Fard et al [19] monitored the electrical tree (ET) in XLPE cable insulation with a camera attached to the microscope and studied the effect of different voltage types on ET and partial discharge. Kang et al [20] extracted the boundary of a burning wood pellet using scanning lines and then calculated its volume based on radius and height, which is important to understand the wood pellet burning mechanism. Lee et al [21] proposed a vision-based method with an adaptive region-of-interest algorithm to locate the marker attached to bridge, and the structural displacements of bridge were measured based on planar homography.…”