Using specially programmed 3–D virtual engineering software, scientists and engineers can save countless hours of mechanical design and test demonstrations to find workable solutions for delivering a sustainable feedstock of biomass for DOE’s Office of Biomass.
To reduce sustainable feedstock production cost and sales price, practical technologies need to be identified and implemented. Nowhere is this more evident than in harvesting biomaterials in a single operation. Biomass handling, separation, and fractionation create gas/solid multi-phase flows with dynamic and complex interactive processes. The physics of these processes presents difficulty — especially for characterizing material flows and biomechanical loads. Various tools, including computational fluid dynamics, finite element stress analysis, and empirical correlations — are being developed to predict the behavior and physics of these processes, and to successfully produce marketable biomaterials.
Research Goals
The goal of this research is to develop predictive computational and experimental methods and tools, including the use of specially programmed 3D virtual engineering software, to design mechanical systems and evaluate biomass handling, fractionation and separation, and preprocessing technologies — that are necessary to reduce operation expenses and increase the quality of bioproducts refineries will purchase and use over time.
Critical Linkages
The methods and tools developed through this research will link feedstock costs, quality, and sustainability metrics of harvesting, preprocessing, bulk handling, and storage systems to downstream pretreatment, hydrolysis, and fermentation operations.
Personnel and Capabilities
Technical staff has varied backgrounds and capabilities with virtual engineering systems simulation and integration, computational stress analysis and fracture mechanics — including particle image velecometry, software development, separation techniques — and experimental and computational fluid mechanics, and fractionation and densification techniques.
Laboratory Equipment
- Sun–Fire 4800 workstation with 12– 750 MHz CPUs
- Fluent 6.2.16 computational fluid dynamics software, with 6 parallel processors
- ABACAS computational stress analysis software
- Computational simulation system
- VE–Suite software package(48 sq. ft–stereo projection screen, two image control and user interface processors, and hi–fidelity projectors)
- Particle Imaging Velocimetry system (Vid–PIV data analysis package, high–resolution color digital analog camera, Class IV laser–particle illumination system, particle seeding system)
- Low volume oscillating biomass separator
- Contact:
- Reuel Smith, (208) 526-3733, Send E-mail