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SRI's commitment to understanding gasification technology has produced significant results, including development of patented technology.
Clients can benefit from SRI's expertise in gasification and tap into the technology's potential. They can benefit from significant new revenue streams by using gasification to convert bagasse and other biomass feedstocks to power, liquid fuels and other high value products.
SRI's research is committed to:
- identifying and developing solutions to technical hurdles;
- establishing the economic viability of the technology; and
- demonstrating the technology on a sufficiently large scale to confirm its capability at a commercial scale.
SRI's capabilities and intellectual property include:
- The development, design and testing of continuous feed system for delivering bagasse to pressurised (3 MPa) gasification systems (patented);
- A pressurised circulating gasifier test facility for determining char yield and gasification rates over a range of pressures (up to 2 Mpa) and temperatures (up to 900°C);
- Technical and economic feasibility studies of the integration of gasification technology within sugar factories;
- Detailed process simulation and optimisation of factory integrated gasifier cycles;
- High level computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modelling of fluidised bed gasifiers;
- Modification of a conventional biomass boiler to operate as a combined boiler and heat recovery steam generator in a gasification and integrated combined cycle system (a CFD study);
- A techno-economic study of whole of cane harvesting and the recovery of cane harvest residues at the factory for increased utilisation and efficiency of gasification systems; and
- The development, design and testing of a 150 tonne/h factory separation plant for the recovery of cane harvest residues for gasification or conventional co-generation.
Current gasification research
SRI is collaborating with Hokkaido and Monash universities in a major Japanese Government funded project aimed at developing a gasifier that produces a high heating value, low tar content product. The latter is to be achieved by using potassium that occurs naturally in biomass (such as cane trash) as a catalyst in cracking the tars produced during gasification to deliver significant gasifier cost and efficiency advantages. The role of SRI in this project is the development of CFD (CFX) and process (HYSYS.Process) models with which to translate bench scale gasification data into a thermodynamically optimised gasification cycle.