Evaluation of self-heating and spontaneous combustion risk of biomass and fishmeal with thermal analysis (DSC-TG) and self-heating substances test experiments

Biomass and fishmeal are two typical organic substances which would self-heat during transport and storage. This paper, we studied the self-heating and spontaneous combustion risk of biomass and fishmeal with thermal analysis (DSC-TG) and self-heating substances test experiments. From DSC-TG of biomass and fishmeal, the heat flow (exotherm) of main decomposition stage for biomass was far higher than that of fishmeal (over twice) and the mass of biomass decreased more quickly during this process. From the self-heating substances test experiments, our biomass sample is not a self-heating substance while our fishmeal sample has low risk of self-heating and spontaneous combustion if it was transported in packages of not more than 3 cubic metres volume according to the classification of self-heating substances. Moreover, activation energy of biomass and fishmeal are calculated based on the kinetics of thermal analysis. Then, CATs of biomass and fishmeal were calculated based on Frank-Kamenetskii theory. The calculated CATs of 1.6 m cube (whose volume is over 3 cubic metres) for biomass and fishmeal are 107.8 °C and 86.7 °C respectively. Though there is still higher risk of self-heating and spontaneous combustion for fishmeal than biomass, there is still relatively low risk of self-heating and spontaneous combustion for both fishmeal and biomass when the volume is around 3 cubic metres.