Developing a Mobile Briquetting Machine

Climate change and the continued rise in greenhouse gas emissions from energy production make innovation in the energy sector more urgent than ever. Most developing countries are highly dependent on biomass for their energy needs for cooking and heating, given that only a fraction of the population is connected to the electricity grid.

Currently, in households in India, this demand is almost entirely met by firewood and charcoal, which are not sustainably produced; hence this practice leads to rapid deforestation. Deforestation, which has been increasing every year, is an important reason for frequent floods globally. The industry, on the other hand, meets its energy needs for processing heat from the same wood fuel sources or from coal, thus contributing to the release of fossil-bonded CO2.

Hundreds of thousands of tonnes of agricultural waste, such as pigeon peas residues, soybean residues, rice husks, maize stalks, and groundnut shells, are burnt every year on farms and around places where agricultural products are processed. This is mainly due to the fact that transporting it to potential end-users is not worthwhile since the density of the waste is too low and transporting large volumes is too expensive. At the same time, the in-field combustion of these materials is hazardous causing high levels of smoke pollution from fine particulate matter (PM) similar to the issue in northern India.