EXTENDING THE EN14214:2003 STANDARD MEASUREMENT TECHNIQUES FOR BIOFUEL QUALITY TO COVER SPECIAL ANALYTICAL ISSUES

摘要

The emerging biofuels sector enjoys presently a strong growth, while new biomass-to-biofuelspathways are leading rapidly to third- and fourth-generation sustainable solutions. The change to renewable energy,however, is not an easy task; besides the technical challenges, there remain key considerations about the lack ofappropriate quality standards. Most of the standards developed for biofuels, as the EN14214:2003, are drawn fromthe assessment of petrofuels, despite the distinct differences between biomass-derived fuel chemistry andpetrochemistry. As a result, the standard methodology often fails, in the sense that the product can nominally complyto specifications but falls short of performance. This work presents a knowledge-based approach for extendingEN14214 to cover the specific biofuels chemistry by means of constructing the network of paths (along with theirintra- and inter relations) for both, fuel and impurities, throughout the whole value chain (bottom-up analysis), basedon information provided by fault tree analysis (in its fuzzy version to count for uncertainty) used herein to identifythe sources of the analytical issues that have been reported for end products (top-down analysis). This approach hasbeen implemented for the oxidation stability protocol, one of the most pressing measurement challenges in theassessment of biodiesel quality.