Fully Integrated Process Demonstration Unit (PDU)
Integrated biorefineries are facilities that convert renewable biomass into any combination of fuels, power, heat, and chemicals. They are analogous to today’s petroleum refineries which produce multiple fuels and products from fossil petroleum. TRI has integrated what are normally independent unit operations, such as feeder systems, gasification, syngas clean-up and conversion of syngas to fuels into a combined, energy efficient system that reduces capital cost and operating expense.The TRI PDU is the largest fully integrated biomass to Fischer-Tropsch facility in North America.
The TRI PDU is currently sited at TRI’s Advanced Development Center (ADC) in Durham, NC. It is the largest fully integrated biomass to Fischer-Tropsch facility in North America and it is utilized by TRI and its clients to replicate commercial project conditions, dramatically reducing project risk and providing important data for generating functional financial models. The TRI ADC also has bench and small scale reactors for performing more fundamental thermal conversion analysis in addition to a full suite of analytical tools useful for gas, liquids, and solids analysis from thermal conversions.
Benefits
The TRI PDU leads the industry for time-on-stream as it pertains to Fischer-Tropsch from biomass derived syngas, and the technical team has a wealth of catalytic conversion experience
TRI’s PDU is large enough that commercial biorefineries built based upon data generated by it have a proven history of scale-up success.
TRI’s PDU and reactor technology are supported and verified by Computational Particle Fluid Dynamic (CPFD) and Aspen HYSYS models that contribute to a nearly seamless utilization of PDU data for evaluating and implementing commercial projects.
TRI’s PDU is operated by a group of individuals with well over 100 years combined experience in process engineering and operations.