Biometria

Biometria is a member-owned and central player in the Swedish forest industry that carries out impartial measurement of the timber and quality controlling of bioenergy material at many power plants mainly in Sweden.

In the center of Stockholm there is one of the world’s largest biomass-fired power plants. Annually, Stockholm Exergi’s Värtan site is producing about 3 000 GWh of heat and electricity. This amount is fulfilling the need of heating about 190 000 households.  At Värtan, Biometria takes care of quality controlling of incoming biomass fuel. The enormous amount of biomass fuel is arriving to the site by vessels, trains, and trucks.

As a rule, the Värtan power plant receives an average of one train carrying biomass fuel per day. The train has dozens of wagons and nearly a hundred containers of biomass from various suppliers. Previously, Biometria employees needed to move a scissor lift next to the train, get on to that lift, and try to dig into the biomass material to take samples. Employees were exposed to hard weather conditions because the site is located next to sea and busiest working months are during the heating season from September to May.

“It is really hard job to collect samples from biomass with your shovel. Sometimes material was frozen, so it was time consuming and hard to get a representative sample from each container. Now, we do not need worry about sampling anymore. Automated sampler Q-Robot makes a hard job, and we collect and analyze samples, tells a Biomass laboratory employee from Värtan site”.

The automated sampling system Q-Robot was taken into commercial use in October 2019. It has already taken thousands of samples and keeps going tirelessly.

“We have had a great experiences of automated sampler Q-Robot. It improves our working safety and gives us more time to take care of the laboratory work. It is also an important thing that we get more accurate results about moisture and other things of the biomass, says Tommi Karjula a biomass specialist at Biometria”