Ash Research from Banff, Canada to Åre, Sweden: A Review on the Impact of Fuel Quality Conference Serie on the Green Transformation, Sustainability and Operation in Modern Power Boilers

For more than 60 years, regular conferences on ash, deposit formation and corrosion research have been held. The first conference was held in Marchwood, just outside Southampton in the UK, in 1963, within the framework of the United Engineering Foundation (UEF). Since 2008, the conference series has been commonly known as the Impact of Fuel Quality (IFQ) conferences.

This paper is a review, covering the development issues presented at IFQ ash conferences held in the time period 2008 – 2022, which have reflected the change from pure energy utilization of fuels, into a situation where we merely produce chemicals (or at least upgraded secondary and tertiary fuels) from primary fuels.

The review is the third in a series of papers outlining the history of the IFQ-conferences, following up where [Bryers, 1996] and [Frandsen, 2009] ended their coverage.

There has also been a change in fuel-base; from being totally dominated by coal, pre-1995, into biomass, 1995-2008, and then further into waste fractions, which have been in strong focus since 2008.

First of all, we have seen much better fuel and ash characterization analytically and via lab-, pilot- and full-scale measurements.