Experimental research on shape and size distribution of biomass particle

Particle shape and particle size distribution are both important factors which could influence the physical properties of granular materials. Due to the high content of cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin, biomass material is anisotropic in spatial structure, which induces the evident difference in mechanical property in different directions. In this paper, we studied the particle shape of four kinds of biomass quantitatively by images analysis, and researched the particle size distributions by sieving method. The results showed that biomass particles have large aspect ratio which decreases with particle size. In the larger size, aspect ratios of different kinds of biomass are obviously different. But all decrease to 2.50 with the decrease of particle size. Moreover, the cumulative mass fraction has a distinct linear relationship with particle size, and different kinds of biomass particles are coincident well in size distributions.