1. Assessment of N2O emission from cement plants: real data measured with both FTIR and NDIR
- Author
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Mosca, Silvia, Benedetti, Paolo, Guerriero, Ettore, and Rotatori, Mauro
- Abstract
Nitrous oxide (N2O) is the third most important greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide and methane, and contributes about 6% to the greenhouse effect. Nitrous oxide is a very small part of the atmosphere, it is a thousand times less CO2, but this is much more potent than CO2 and methane for its long life because of his long stay in the atmosphere of approx. 120 years and the high global warming potential (GWP) of 298 times that of CO2. Although greenhouse gases they are naturally in the atmosphere, human activities have changed the atmospheric concentrations. Most of the values of emission of nitrous oxide are still obtained by means of emission factors and not actually measured, the lack of real data may result in an underestimation of current emissions. The emission factors used for the calculation of N2O can be obtained from the “Guidelines for the implementation of the national inventory of emissions, IPCC”, which refer to all nations for the realization of their inventory. The study will present real data, measured in several Italian cement plants with different characteristics. The work also shows a comparison between N2O concentration measured with in-situ Fourier Transform IR (FTIR) and the reference method EN ISO 21258 based on non-dispersive IR (NDIR), in order to investigate the interfering compounds in the measurement with NDIR. IMPLICATIONSN2O may arise as an unwanted by-product of NOx abatement systems, in particular selective non-catalytic reduction (SNCR). Since it is applied in the cement plants, N2O emission from cement industry is evaluated, with both FTIR and NDIR instrument. Several considerations emerged from the results. First of all, the emission from this industrial sector is not negligible and for that reason N2O concentration should be regulated; another observations is that the reference method based on NDIR technique, is not as selective as FTIR could be.
- Published
- 2014
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