The Digest’s 2024 Multi-Slide Guide to Feedstock Material Handling

A primary challenge in the design of a biorefinery is the storage, transport, and reactor feeding of the biomass feedstocks. Material handling/feeding is prone to process upsets such as jamming and clogging, resulting in increased downtime and ultimately higher costs. Commercial-scale conversion of biomass in biorefineries remains limited. A team of researchers aim to develop first principles-based design tools that enable continuous, steady, trouble-free bulk flow transport through processing train to reactor throat and enable applications of the developed tools to industry stakeholders. Yidong Xia of Idaho National Laboratory presented these slides at DOE Project Peer Review on the progress to date.