Abstract
Biomass is worldwide available and the interest in it as energy source has been increased in the recent years, with the aim to reduce the fossil fuels dependence and to increase energy supply in developing countries. Nevertheless, biomass combustion emissions put some concerns for its environmental acceptance, particularly for carbon monoxide (CO), polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), and particulate matter (PM) contents, which must be reduced to meet the current environmental limits. Among the different technologies for the abatement of these pollutants, wall flow filters may represent an efficient solution since they allow to combine physical filtration processes for particles removal and catalytic oxidative reactions for solid and gaseous pollutants treatment. In this work, two different types of wall flow filters, respectively made of silicon carbide (SiC) and alumina (Al2O3), have been tested directly at the exhaust of a 30 kW nominal power conventional pellet boiler. The two samples were chemically and structurally characterized before testing. From the first set of experiments, the SiC filters, specifically loaded with 15 %wt and 25 %wt copper ferrite (CuFe2O4) as catalyst, proved to be more suitable for the aim of this research, since they allow to simultaneously reduce CO and PM emissions of about 95 % and 92 % respectively. Different filters geometries, fitting locations inside equipment and new active species deserve further investigations.
