THE USE OF MICRO NEAR-INFRARED SPECTROSCOPY AND PRINCIPAL COMPONENT ANALYSIS (PCA) TO DETERMINE ORIGIN AND SOURCE OF WOOD PELLET

Qualitative properties of woody biofuel need to be declared due to their great influence on the combustion process. The furnace performance and the environmental impact could be improved with major monitoring of the physical and chemical characteristics of incoming biofuel. Furthermore, raw components origin should be tracked in the whole supply chain, promoting traceability. The lack of a unique characterization system could be overtaken with the Near Infrared (NIR) spectroscopy application as a cheaper, faster, and no-invasive tool to investigate main wood components and origin discrimination based on spectral differences. So, a portable NIRScan Nano has been applied to evaluate the separation between grounded softwood and hardwood but also a virgin and treated wood sample. Chemometric analysis of PCA has been carried out and the main results have been shown considering the score and loading plot of the pre-treated spectra. A rough separation between virgin and treated wood was obtained, mainly related to natural heterogeneity and the presence of discriminant chemical components. Similar results have been confirmed considering the variability between softwood and hardwood. According to the separation trends between each group, NIR proves to be an affordable and intuitive method to assess qualitative features of woody biofuel.