Avaliação das propriedades mecânicas e de estabilidade de briquetes lignocelulósicos

Abstract

Briquetting is a technique of compressing and agglutinating organic wastes into briquettes to be used as environmental friendly fuelwood. Currently, this technique is being spread worldwide, due to the low-to-no cost of the raw material used and the much more favorable characteristics its products, the briquettes, presents when compared to those made with firewood originated from hardwoods. This study aims to characterize through several destructive and non destructive techniques the main properties of a lignocellulosic briquette and it consists of two phases. The first one is the comparison of the thermal, burning and stability properties of commercial briquettes, eucalyptus fuel wood and the briquettes produced using the technique of hermetic batch briquetting which were conceived by the author in his course conclusion paper for the undergraduate course in Mechanical Engineering. The second phase concerns the evaluation of mechanical, thermal, burning and stability properties of new briquettes produced following a standardization process. The properties studied have the function of determining the degree of quality that the briquettes produced by the new briquetting technique have in comparison with other biomass fuels. It can be concluded that the briquettes produced by the hermetic batching briquetting technique have the same or higher quality of properties as biomass fuel.