Containerized handling to minimize hauling cost of herbaceous biomass

Herbaceous biomass can contribute to the renewable energy supply for electricity, process steam, liquid fuel, and commodity chemicals. Efficient systems to harvest and store round bales of perennial grass in storage locations within 5 km of the production fields are available. The major limitations...

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Veröffentlicht in:Biomass & bioenergy 2008-04, Vol.32 (4), p.308-313
Hauptverfasser: Cundiff, John S., Grisso, Robert D.
Format: Artikel
Sprache:eng
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Zusammenfassung:Herbaceous biomass can contribute to the renewable energy supply for electricity, process steam, liquid fuel, and commodity chemicals. Efficient systems to harvest and store round bales of perennial grass in storage locations within 5 km of the production fields are available. The major limitations are loading these bales at the storage locations and hauling to meet a weekly demand schedule at a processing plant operating continuously for 50 weeks yr −1. Analysis is presented for a 27 Mg h −1 plant. The concept is to pack 32, 1.5-m round bales into a container with the same dimensions as a 12.2-m (40-ft) ISO shipping container. These containers are loaded at a satellite storage location, hauled to a receiving facility at the processing plant, and unloaded. The analysis examines two options. Option 1 uses a forklift to place a loaded container onto a standard transport chassis at the satellite storage location. A similar forklift unloads the containers at the receiving facility. Option 2 uses a Swinglift trailer that loads and unloads the containers onto the trailer using on-board hydraulics. The cost for Option 1 was calculated at $7.80 dry Mg −1, as compared with $8.37 dry Mg −1 calculated for Option 2. The cost for Option 1 is lower even though the forklift used at the satellite storage location in Option 1 is only operated at 27% of daily capacity, thus operating cost per dry Mg to load is higher than it would be if scheduling could be done such that more containers could be loaded each workday. The forklift spends most of the time waiting for the container to be packed with bales. The limiting factor established in this analysis is the feasibility of packing 32 bales into a container within an allowed 30 min.
ISSN:0961-9534
1873-2909
DOI:10.1016/j.biombioe.2007.10.009