A review on biomass ignition: fundamental characteristics, measurements, and predictions

Exploiting biomass energy is a promising option to reduce CO2 emissions, owing to its renewability and carbon neutrality. The knowledge of biomass ignition becomes critical for processing fuels with regard to safety control and optimizing their combustion processes. Although there are many papers published in the field that investigate biomass combustion, less research effort was made to focus on the ignition behavior of biomass during the combustion processes. Therefore, this review work aims to investigate in detail the ignition characteristics of biomass dust fuels focusing on the most critical fuel properties and operating reactor conditions that affect ignition delay and ignition mode. The review also covers biomass combustion modeling methods focusing on the capabilities, similarities, and major drawbacks of the models in terms of ignition prediction.