A correlation for calculating elemental composition from proximate analysis of biomass materials

Elemental composition of biomass is an important property, which defines the energy content and determines the clean and efficient use of the biomass materials. However, the ultimate analysis requires very expensive equipments and highly trained analysts. The proximate analysis on the other hand only requires standard laboratory equipments and can be run by any competent scientist or engineer. This work introduces a general correlation, based on proximate analysis of biomass materials, to calculate elemental composition, derived using 200 data points and validated further for additional 50 data points. The entire spectrum of solid lignocellulosic materials have been considered in the derivation of the present correlation, which is given as: C = 0.637FC + 0.455VM, H = 0.052FC + 0.062VM, O = 0.304FC + 0.476VM, where FC – 4.7–38.4% fixed carbon, VM – 57.2–90.6% volatile matter, C – 36.2–53.1% carbon, H – 4.36–8.3% hydrogen and O – 31.37–49.5% oxygen in wt% on a dry basis. The average absolute error of these correlations are 3.21%, 4.79%, 3.4% and bias error of 0.21%, −0.15% and 0.49% with respect to measured values C, H and O, respectively. The major advantage of these correlations is their capability to compute elemental components of biomass materials from the simple proximate analysis and thereby provides a useful tool for the modeling of combustion, gasification and pyrolysis processes.