Gianfranco Gianfelice

• University of Padua

Aiming at improving the design of wood pellet stoves and boilers, we developed original experiments to study chemical and physical processes occurring in a single pellet. We investigated medium temperature (<550 °C) and low air flowrate, where smouldering prevails. Two setups have been used, allowing to monitor the pellet weight loss, internal temp...

We investigated the exploitation of horse manure for energy recovery by combustion. First, the impact of the waste origin and management (storage conditions) was evaluated in terms of elemental analysis, moisture content, heating value, and ash melting temperature. Besides some carbon loss over the time, horse manure origin and management policy do...

We investigated the autoignition and self-heating of three different dried, wastewater treatment sludges of different origin and share of municipal and industrial waste water. We used a custom testing apparatus to study large (approx. 20 g) samples, where heat- and mass transfer limitations are purposely relevant, as in real scale applications. We...

The oxidation of dry sewage sludge evolves quite differently depending on the origin of the sludge, even in the case of predominantly municipal origin. The differences are less evident by analyzing the materials with traditional techniques of thermogravimetric analysis suggesting that they derive predominantly from physical, rather than chemical fe...

We investigated the smouldering onset and propagation in a biomass (pine bark) bed to mitigate or control the process. By the addition of sand, the bed porosity has been modified. Sand of different average particle size, in different arrangements and proportions (from 30 to 70%) has been used, modifying the bed porosity (between 0.44 and 0.67). Exp...