Prediction of heating values of biomass fuel from elemental composition

A subset of 122 samples, all consisting of plant materials, has been used to develop regression models for a prediction of HHV from the elemental composition. Models with best predictive ability have been obtained using the contents of carbon, C; hydrogen, H; and nitrogen, N, and applying the methods OLS and PLS with the variables C, C2, H, C × H and N. The standard errors of prediction of the best new models are considerably smaller than those obtained with models found in literature.