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The financial support of the European Union for the project (ENK5 CT 2002-80648) is gratefully acknowledged

Participation of technical experts

In addition to the project partners, also other technical experts are highly welcomed to join in! The project group is soliciting for parties to join the main R&D activities (Round Robin analyses and parallel testing), as well as additional R&D work in the coming two years. Technical experts are highly welcomed to join the tar activities! Experts on bio-energy, gas cleaning and/or tar measurement can contribute in two ways in the project:

Participation in the R&D activities
The parallel tests will be performed in spring and fall 2004. Also contribution in the "additional research" activities is welcomed. A complete R&D plan of the project is shown on the table below and can also facilitate interested parties to find national funds necessary for the performance of the activities.

Participation at the CEN Task Force
Apart from this R&D work on accuracy and reproducibility, under CEN a Task Force (TF) has been created for the formal route of standardisation of CEN. The Task Force is quite similar to a Technical Committee (TC) under CEN. TC's are the formal body under which CEN standards are prepared.

In the standardisation trajectory, a new standard is to be voted upon by the National Standardisation institutes in the participating countries.  In practice, for many CEN TF's / TC's the standardisation experts of National Standardisation institutes do not come to meetings themselves but are represented by technical experts from their country. When a new TF or TC is created, the standardisation expert looks for experts in their country to participate.

We ask technical experts in the field to become the expert for this TF. What does this mean in terms of time of money? It will cost probably no money and the amount of time to be spent can be decided by you. You will receive the documents of the Task Force meetings. You decide how much time you'll spend reading them. You are invited for the Task Force meetings but not at all obliged to come. Last but not least you'll be asked to vote on the standard once it is ready.

For you this is an opportunity to:
 - stay updated on the progress of the work in the project and in the TF;
 - give comments on behalf of your country on the draft Standard on tar measurement.
 - Vote on behalf of your country on the final Standard on tar measurement.
 
For us, we would like to have as many experts involved in our Task Force in order to get response and improve the quality of our work, in order to disseminate our work and in order to be sure to come to one common Standard on tar measurement in the future.

Then, we'll find out who is the person to contact at your national standardisation institute. You should contact him or her with the request to become the national expert for this topic. The national standardisation institute will - if it agrees - contact the secretary of the Task Force in order to officially arrange your participation. Once this is done, the secretary of the Task Force via the National Standardisation Institute will send documents to you.

If you have questions on R&D activities, please contact Beatrice Coda at coda@ecn.nl.

If you have questions on the standardisation work, do not hesitate to contact John Neeft at j.neeft@novem.nl

CH. R&D required Planned time period
2.1 Round Robin of gas chromatographic method March-November 2003- completed
  - synthetic samples March-June 2003
  - real tar samples August- November 2003
2.2 Round Robin of gravimetric method (real tar samples) August-November 2003- still ongoing
2.3 Parallel measurement April-October 2004
2.4 Testing Guideline for low tar concentrations (1 – 1000 mg/m3n) March 2003 – October 2004
2.5 Influence of tar concentration on gravimetric tar determination March 2003–October 2004
CH. R&D interesting Planned time period
3.1 Initial parallel testing November 2003–April 2004
3.2 Petersen column VTT: in 2003
ECN: 2003-2004
3.3 Comparison of the Guideline method with other methods ECN (SPA) 2003 – 2004
3.4 Solid adsorbents *
3.5 Tar polymerisation in probe/filter *
3.6 Tar extraction from particle filter *