After the 2005 meeting, the group’s standards committee created a road map to investigate and promulgate an effective quality control program. The program is more than a set of standards and testing methods. “Standardizing test methods is great, but unless you’re going to have some level of enforcement that doesn’t mean much,” Wiberg says. “The standards also have to mean something. We had to go through every single parameter and ask why we should regulate that parameter.”

One standard that got the boot was the sodium standard. Sodium is often used as a proxy for the amount of chloride in a solid fuel, Wiberg says. Too much chloride can cause metal in stoves to corrode. In some fuels this is close enough, but other fuels can have chloride salts of calcium and magnesium so the sodium level will badly underestimate the chloride level. “They thought it was easier to test for sodium than chloride,” Wiberg says. “But it’s not a very representative test.”

There were other tests that were valuable to the pellet industry in Europe that weren’t being used in the United States. “One of those was the pellet durability index,” Wiberg says.

Hearth and Home
There are differences between the pellet markets in the United States and overseas. In Europe, pellets are used mainly for central heating in furnaces where the American market is primarily stoves and fireplaces. The need for standards that reflected the different markets for pellet fuels became the premise for framing the new standards. “A stove is a lot more finicky,” Wiberg says. “It has to have [pellets of] a very consistent density and diameter. So we had to ask, ‘What should a good, high-quality, high-efficiency stove be burning?”

After three years of work, the Pellet Fuels Institute is close to releasing its revised quality standards. The new standards will recognize four grades of pellets: super premium, premium, standard and utility. “Each grade has a specific battery of specifications, both physical and chemical,” Wiberg says.

The other part of the specifications is the recognized testing methods for each of the quality parameters. “We did an extensive research project on what methods are out there and who is using what method,” Wiberg says. “It wasn’t just the European Union. Germany had its own standards as did Austria, Sweden and Britain. There are about a dozen countries that have something going on with pellets. Everybody is kind of doing their own thing.”

ASTM International has no standard for fuel pellets, but the Pellet Fuels Institute specifications will follow the ASTM format. If the industry approves the rules, they will be presented to ASTM for consideration as a new standard. Most of the test methods used in the institute’s standards are based on recognized ASTM methods.

A few of the methods did have to be modified to cope with the unique property of fuel pellets. Wiberg describes the bulk density test, which in the ASTM standard required a cubic-foot container of pellets to be dropped 6 inches three times. Because pellets are a loose product, dropping a container from 6 inches will cause a significant number of the pellets to fly up and out of the box. So a method using a quarter-cubic-foot box that was tapped from about an inch high was adapted. The group then had to determine how many taps were needed to get a similar result to the ASTM standard. “We probably ran 100 density tests to tell us we were going to tap it 25 times. That seems like a simple thing to recommend, but it probably took us two days to figure out how many times you have to tap pellets.”

The other phase of the process for the Pellet Fuels Institute is to provide the tools necessary for pellet manufacturers to start doing quality control in their own plants. “The mill operators are not chemists,” Wiberg says. “They don’t necessarily know where to buy this equipment and how to run the tests.”

Twin Ports Testing went to its suppliers to create a suite of testing equipment that would measure the quality parameters of pellets in an industrial setting. “We needed to find things that nonchemistry-type people can use,” Wiberg says. “We also need something that will be representative of the test method used in a lab. It also can’t be an overnight deal, because an ongoing [quality assurance/quality control] process control program needs same day results.”

The final piece of the quality puzzle is enforcement. The best standards in the world aren’t going to do any good if the consumer isn’t confident the product meets those standards. So the Pellet Fuels Institute is planning to implement a registration system for manufacturers. Pellet makers would have to show that they have a quality control program and submit quality data quarterly. “The data will show that the company made the grade in the first place and the company continues to comply on an ongoing basis,” Wiberg says. “If everything works out right, the company can say its pellets are premium quality and can prove its pellets are premium. Then they get put into the registration system that will be a list of all the mills in the program.”

<-- Previous Page	1   2   3	Next Page -->
View Entire Article