Metallic and Carbonaceous Particle Emissions from Heavy Oil Combustion

In the last decade, the interest of the particulate impact on human health has been more and more growing. The combustion of heavy fuel oil for power generation is a great source of carbonaceous and inorganic particle emissions, eventhough the combustion technologies and their efficiency are improving. In fact, it is well known, that the size distribution of carbonaceous particles is bimodal: a portion is emitted as nanoparticles1 originated from gas to particles inception processes (i.e. soot particles) and, a part is generated from the pyrolysis inside the droplets of the heavier fractions of the fuels as particles with typical size of a few microns. The information about the size distribution function of the particles originated by trace metals present into the fuels is not adequate. A lot of studies were carried on the nature of the particulate matter emitted by coal-fired plant, but only few investigations are available for particulate matter formed from oil-fired plants. In this paper, we focus our attention on the larger distribution mode of both the carbonaceous and metallic particles emitted from oil combustion, reserving the analysis of the nanometric size fraction to a further analysis.