At INL’s Biomass Feedstock National User Facility (BFNUF), researchers work with producers of their specific biofuels and bioproducts to reduce biomass feedstock variability and produce high quality feedstock from grass, wood, and agricultural residues. Facilities include pilot-and-bench-scale preprocessing units for feedstock drying, size and ash reduction, blending, and densification, plus laboratories for physical and chemical analyses of resulting biomass and engineered biomass feedstocks.
Located in a new 27,000 square-foot facility at INL, the user facility employs a reconfigurable Process Demonstration Unit (PDU) to analyze various methods of feedstock operations and preprocessing prior to conversion. The Biomass Analytical Library characterizes biomass physical and chemical properties, while offering a reference database of nearly 70,000 samples of various designs.
FEEDSTOCK DEVELOPMENT
BFNUF offers a range of pre-processing capabilities, laboratory testing, and research advancement in technology-enabling customization of feedstock to any biorefinery specifications at a commercial scale.
PROCESS DEVELOPMENT
The PDU offers services in five categories with various equipment, including size reduction, separation/fractionation, thermal treatment, chemical treatment, and densification.
SYSTEM-LEVEL SOLUTION
Feedstock PDU offers unique capabilities to test and develop fully integrated and instrumented industrial-scale preprocessing systems to identify bottlenecks, interaction and synergies of single or blended feedstocks that affect specification and conversion performance, and optimization of integrated systems efficiency.
CAPABILITIES
BFNUF’s PDU and Biomass Analytical Library offer a fully instrumented, reconfigurable testing capability to provide insight into the effectiveness of biomass processing and equipment, including the following:
BENCH-SCALE TO PILOT-SCALE PRODUCTION
Converting biomass feedstock differs depending on the conversion pathway selected by the biorefinery:
Biochemical conversion – prefers herbaceous or hardwood biomass milled to intermediate particle sizes (ranging 6 to 50 mm)
Pyrolysis – requires finely milled feedstock (less than 2 mm)
Gasification – accommodates a wide range of particle sizes (technology specific)
Combustion via co-firing with coal – favors chipped and torrefied woody biomass thathas been finely milled.
Research Contact: Kevin Kenney - Phone: (208) 526-8098 - Kevin.Kenney@inl.gov
