Streamlining Bioenergy Feedstock Engineering

The DOE Biomass Program’s feedstock research and development tools enable collaboration and sharing of feedstock development knowledge never before available. This not only could revolutionize biorefinery operations, but create innovations to supply entirely new products and markets.

The collaborative feedstock research cycle begins with lab-scale feedstock “recipe” development. Large volumes of selected formulations can then be produced using the Feedstock PDU which incorporates size reduction, preconversion, fractionation, blending and densification treatments—as called for in the feedstock recipe. The feedstock undergoes compositional and attribute characterization prior to conversion performance testing. After conversion, the performance results are then analyzed to help identify needed refinements and determine when feedstocks are ready for scale-up.

With funding from the DOE Biomass Program, INL designed and constructed a feedstock engineering Process Demonstration Unit (PDU) to complement laboratory tools used to develop customized feedstocks. The Feedstock PDU enables INL and its industry partners to test preprocessing technologies and advance feedstock engineering into the development phase.