AAAR 34th Annual Conference
October 12 - October 16, 2015
Hyatt Regency
Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
Abstract View
Micro-environmental Air Quality Impact of a Biomass Boiler with and without PM Emission Control
ZHEMING TONG, Bo Yang, Kui Wang, Devraj Thimmaiah, Philip K. Hopke, Thomas Whitlow, Andrew Landers, K. Max Zhang, Cornell University
Abstract Number: 96 Working Group: Urban Aerosols
Abstract Initiatives to displace petroleum and climate change mitigation have driven a recent increase in space heating with biomass combustion in New York State and elsewhere in the Northeast. However, there is ample evidence that biomass combustion emits significant quantities of known health damaging pollutants. We investigated the micro-environmental air quality impact of a biomass-fueled combined heat and power system equipped with an electrostatic precipitator (ESP) in Syracuse, NY. Emission factors are derived based on in-stack measurement both upstream and downstream of ESP with EPA Method 5/202. In tandem with the stack testing, two rooftop stations with PM2.5 and CO2 analyzers were set up in the way that one can capture the plume while the other one serves as the background in comparison depending on the wind direction. Four sonic anemometers were deployed around the stack to quantify highly spatially and temporally resolved local wind pattern. A computational fluid dynamic-based micro-environmental model was applied to simulate the experimental conditions, and a good agreement between predicted and on-site measurement is observed for both flow fields and plume dispersion. Our analysis shows that the absence of ESP could lead to an almost 7 times increase in near-ground PM2.5 concentrations with a maximum concentration >50 µg m-3 in the surrounding environment. This result demonstrates the critical role of air pollution controls for biomass combustion systems. In addition, we explored various physical parameters including stack temperature/height, ambient wind, and surrounding structures to provide recommendations for siting biomass-fueled heating equipment in order to minimize local air pollution.