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CET awarded $645,000 from ARC for biofuels project

7 July 2015

The CET team has been awarded $645,000 to enable commercial scale production of biocrude from microalgae or biosolids at the Muradel production plant in Whyalla, South Australia.biofuels

The project will advance knowledge about and develop new engineering design tools for a novel hydrothermal liquefaction (HTL) reactor. The aim is to scale-up HTL technology to achieve cost-effective production of biofuels.

To optimise the new reactor, the team will develop tools including:

  • a chemical model of the complex, multi-component reactions
  • a computational model of the mixing and heat transfer within it
  • a network model of the energy and exergy flows.

The team believes that the new reactor concept has strong potential to overcome the limitations of Muradel’s existing demonstration reactor for commercial scale which, while world-leading, is uneconomical at commercial scale.

The project, which is funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC), includes researchers from the University of Adelaide and Purdue University (United States of America). It also has cash and in-kind support from Muradel.

Through this project, the CET team is continuing to strengthen its partnership with Muradel and contribute to its shared goal of achieving cost-effective production of bio-fuels.

 

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