The Advantages Of Wood Pellets Over Biomass Briquettes

One of the questions we often get asked is why we do not provide any equipment for the compression of biomass or wood briquettes.

We do not believe that briquettes have no place in the market as they are an obvious substitute for wood logs. However, pellets have many advantages over briquettes which is why we focus more on wood pellets and other biomass fuel pellets. Briquettes are basically a very large pellet, and a few different designs of press are used for their production. One of the most common on a small scale in China is the screw type briquette press. However this system uses a lot of power and an electrically heated collar to produce the briquette. To give an example, to produce just 120 kgs of briquettes per hour it takes an 11kw motor and a 4.5kw heated collar. A pellet mill to produce the same productivity of wood pellets would also use roughly the same power motor, however it would not use a 4.5kw collar to heat the material. The other types of briquette machine are based on kinetic energy through piston power or using an hydraulic press. While these processes are more efficient they do not produce a superior product. The screw type makes a briquette with a hole through the centre. This allows air to travel through and means more of the surfaces is exposed to combustion. The piston and hydraulic presses produce a solid briquette which does not burn as efficiently. Efficiency is very important and this is where wood pellets produced in the pellet mill are also superior. Pellets have a much larger surface area open to combustion, and this means less smoke and more heat more quickly. The facts are that pellets can be used in every application a briquette can with the help of a pellet basket in the fire box. Please see below.