The Background: Thermal Kinetics partnered with SYNPET Technologies to provide design, engineering, equipment and commissioning services for a renewable fuels large scale pilot plant.
This unique process produced a clean fuel oil, fuel gas, fertilizer, and biochar. Thermal efficiency exceeded 85% of the heating value of the feed stock recovered as fuel products utilizing municipal waste, sludge, and plastics as the feed.
The Challenge: The broad range of feed sent to the plant required a robust design of front-end material handling equipment and a means to transfer this feed to very high pressure reactors with heat recovery to enable the required thermal efficiency. Ensuring that the changes to the feed could be managed on the back-end recovery processes without recovery capacity reductions was another project focus.
The Solution: Thermal Kinetics’ engineers were involved in process development and design discussions from project infancy to completion. As a member of the design team at the earliest stage it allowed TK to implement process changes during this ‘process development’ stage. In this stage the bench-scale testing under Thermal Kinetics’ guidance provided the full range of parameters that the full-scale pilot plant would need to be able to operate. The Thermal Kinetics systems operated as designed and provided SYNPET with a plant that can manage the variability of Feed and consequently the variability of Products. SYNPET now is taking this capability to the next stages of business development to solve municipal waste management challenges in a fully environmentally friendly approach.