Aerosol Black Carbon Emissions from Domestic Biomass Fuel Burning Installations

The black carbon (BC) emission resulting from human activity comes mainly from fossil fuels and solid biomass burning, as well as transport fuels due to incomplete combustion. The biggest sources of BC pollution are currently diesel transport and domestic heating appliances burning solid fossil fuels or biomass. Firewood and pellet fuels were used for this BC research. The study used four domestic heating appliances using wood and agricultural waste pellets, as well as several types of firewood. The tests used a gravimetric particulate analysis method to determine the total amount of particulate matter. In further physical and chemical analyses, the emissions are broken down into components, i.e., substances of known composition that can be separated from the sample and weighed. In our study, the BC emissions varied from 0 to 120 mg/MJ depending on the type of boiler (automatic or manual), the combustion mode (based on oxygen supply), and the type of fuel. Emissions varied from 0–8 mg/MJ in a modern pellet-fired and automatically-controlled boiler, and from 1–25 mg/MJ in a wood-fired water heating boiler, with the highest emissions found for softwood (spruce). In the pellet stove with automatic feeding and control, BC emissions varied between 1 and 120 mg/MJ, with the highest emissions detected for wood pellets, and in the wood-burning fireplace, the emissions varied between 6 and 80 mg/MJ, with the highest emissions detected for birch firewood.