A lot of industries use their laboratories to check the specifications and quality of their products. But how do you collect a reliable and representative sample from a running process? How to do this with rough materials like biomass that comes from the forest and can be very inhomogeneous?
CBI Europe came with these questions to INADCO Systems
. CBI Europe, located with their headquarter in Nijverdal, the Netherlands, is the subsidiary of the listed company CBI America, a division of Terex Environmental. CBI provides worldwide solutions and equipment for forestry and power generation. INADCO Systems, located in Eersel, the Netherlands is specialized in developing custom solutions for biomass sampling, including equipment for measuring moisture content, bulk density and mass flow. CBI was looking for a system to automatically collect samples from a product stream of chipped forestry residues for their new to be build installation extension at the power plant in Vaasa, Finland. In this new extension – equipped with a 1,000 kW powered wood chipper – twigs, trunks and stumps are reduced to a size of 1-15 cm. These chips are then transported with a conveyor belt system to a storage silo so that they can be used at a later moment for the generation of green energy. The collected sample is used to calculate the energy value based on which the delivery is paid for.
Taking a reliable and representative sample requires that each sampling is performed in the same way everytime, with the correct interval of time and enough product. The solution for this was found in an evolution of the well known INADCO Densimeter, which collects a sample every 5 sec in a weighing measuring cylinder.with a flat rotating plate from a vertical product flow.
Thanks to a choice of 4 sets of parameters the user is able to set the total required weight of the sample and the interval time for collecting the product during production. With every strike of the rotating plate it collects a small amount of product and drops this into the cylinder. When the weight of the collected product in the cylinder is equal to or higher than the selected sample weight the cylinder opens the bottom so that the collected sample slides on a chute into one of the two drums beneath the sampler. After this the sampler restarts with collecting on the product and the chute rotates to the other drum.
Thanks to the use of the INADCO Sampler, CBI can now collect reliable and representative samples for calculating the energy value of its biomass. By now the INADCO Sampler is added in one of the standard equipment from which INADCO can supply.
Text by INADCO Systems
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