Today’s society is standing in front of a revolution where fossil energy should be replaced with renewable energy. Governmental agencies and policy makers have formed goals and regulations to become greener, and the organisation Fossil Free Sweden has published roadmaps for fossil free competitiveness. Therefore, this report has connected Paroc’s operations with a roadmap for fossil free competitiveness to form a strategic environmental plan. Early, it was recognized that the field was big and a limitation to CO2-emissions during production were established. The facts were gathered mostly throughout literature studies, scientific publications/articles, and personal communication with personnel at Paroc/Owens Corning. The results gave a description over fossil free competitiveness for the construction sector, previous, and current sustainability efforts at Paroc. After that, the report lifted suggestions of modifications to the mainstream process. Focus laid on the reduction of coke, propane, and dolomite. Later, the report discussed a possible strategy to become fossil free by 2045. It found out that there are many approaches to become climate neutral. Moreover, a need for practical testing of the solutions in the mainstream processes, and that emissions can be calculated in an absolute of relative way.

<p>A small plasma generation system was first developed using a ring-pin electrode configuration with the goal of producing a plasma disk at the burner outlet. Two distinct plasma regimes were identified: diffused and filamentary. Diffuse discharges were generated at low frequencies while filamentary discharges were generated at moderate to high frequencies. The induced flow fields generated by both diffuse and filamentary plasma discharges were investigated using high-speed schlieren visualization and particle image velocimetry. The rise in gas temperature was measured using optical emission spectroscopy. Lastly, the electrical properties for both types of plasma discharges was measured. The measurements provided a set of pulse parameters for the investigation of the plasma-flame interaction on the atmospheric pressure burner. </p> An atmospheric pressure plasma-assisted burner with a ring-pin electrode geometry was designed and fabricated to investigate the effect of nanosecond repetitively pulsed discharges on methane-air flames. The burner can produce both Bunsen-type and swirl-stabilized flames (helical vane swirlers, swirl number of 0.62) with a modular design to allow for a removable block swirler component. Flame chemiluminescence and direct imaging of flame structure and dynamics was done to understand the burner’s operating limits. The burner can operate 6 – 13 kW flames, with flames stabilizing at approximately 2 inches above the burner exit. The effect of air flow rate on plasma formation was investigated and it was found that the high velocity of the incoming gas changes the plasma regime and electrical properties. Finally, the plasma discharge was applied on lifted, swirled flames and used for plasma-assisted ignition. For lifted swirled flames, we found that a minimum of 100 pulses is required to generate a filamentary discharge in the air stream. Higher number of pulses at high frequencies appeared to extinguish the primary flame. A minimum of 6000 was used for ignition. The plasma-assisted burner will allow for future studies to investigate the plasma flame coupling for various conditions using a wide variety of diagnostics. <br>

Technological evolution and mass production is impacting the Earth daily due to global warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions, where the biggest factor is the emission of carbon dioxide mostly caused by the burning of fossil fuel and industrial processes. Therefore, alternatives for substituting the use of fossil fuel in industries are extremely important. This thesis project investigates the method of using plasma technology using a plasma burner  which is electrically generated and could be an ideal solution for industrial metallurgical, chemical and mechanical processes due to its unique characteristics such as high energy densities, extremely high temperatures, rapid heating of surfaces and melting materials with a small installation size. Using the software COMSOL Multiphysics, a 2D model geometry is set up to simulate and investigate the behavior of the plasma burner by varying different parameters to improve the performance of the plasma burner. The results are based on simulations and no experiments were performed. However, we visited RISE ETC to observe and learn about the plasma burner model. At last, a geometry investigation was done by calculating the thermal efficiency to designate the most efficient geometry.