KIT-NREL-TCPDU

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National Renewable Energy Laboratory – Thermochemical Process Users Facility

TA11 – KIT-NREL-TCPDU 

Location

15013 Denver West Parkway

80401 Golden,  United States 

Description

National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s thermochemical programme includes both bench-scale (500 g/h) and pilot-scale facilities for research on biomass gasification and pyrolysis, including the 1 Metric Tonne/Day Thermochemical Process Users Facility (TCUF). Components of the TCUF include capabilities for thermal and catalytic gasification and pyrolysis in both fluid bed and entrained flow reactor configurations, tar reforming (gasification only) and product collection, separation, and upgrading to fuels and chemicals. Both bench-scale and full-stream pilot-scale catalytic fuels synthesis reactor labs are integrated into the TCUF for testing catalysts using authentic biomass-derived syngas. Additional pilot-scale capabilities include a Davison Recirculating Reactor system for investigation of ex situ upgrading of biomass pyrolysis vapors.

NREL has extensive experience with hydroprocessing of bio-oil from biomass pyrolysis and algal oils. Equipment includes high-pressure micro-reactors from 50cc – 500cc scale for carrying-out batch and continuous catalytic upgrading. Extensive analytical instrumentation is available that can be used for full characterisation of feed and products using 2-D GCxGC/TOFMS, NMR, IR, elemental and trace metals analysis.

Testing Capabilities

Modelling Capabilities
NREL has developed the System Advisory Model (SAM), which is an advanced and publicly available application for energy conversion and energy storage system modeling and technoeconomic analysis. NREL has also developed and validated component-level models to aid design, operation, and optimisation of energy systems. In particular, a molten salt thermal energy storage tank model has been developed and validated using real data from concentrating solar power plants. The model considers residual stress and distortion of the tank floor after welding fabrication enabling a high-fidelity representation of molten salt tanks under typical or challenging operation conditions. The model could be adapted to replicate specific tank designs, enabling the quantification of temperature and stress distribution in the tank shell, floor, and roof, as a function of typical, real, or hypothetical operation conditions. NREL has multiple local computational workstations for moderate-scale simulations and High-performance computing (HPC). NREL’s Kestrel HPC GPU-based platform for large-scale and highly parallelised (computationally efficient) simulations.

Experimental Evaluation

  • Molten salt corrosion experimental setup for evaluation of corrosion allowance and behavior of materials for energy storage applications.
  • Lab-scale experimental apparatus to analyse rock/fluid reactions and metal/cement degradations with various atmosphere and fluid conditions at:
    1. High temperatures (up to 800°C and ambient pressure)
    2. High temperature and pressure (300°C and 20.7 MPa)
    3. Expertise and availability to acquire and build autoclaves at up to 500°C and 40MPa
  • High temperature material property characterisations for casing and cement materials at up to 800°C and ambient pressure such as density, porosity, specific heat, thermal conductivity, coefficient of thermal expansion
  • High temperature mechanical property measurements at up to 800°C and ambient pressure such as compressive/tensile strength, torsion, fatigue, etc.
  • Ex situ characterisation capabilities of experimental products: electron microscopy, x-ray diffraction, FTIR, Raman spectroscopy, optical microscope, X-ray CT, differential scanning calorimeter, thermogravimetric analysis, etc. Some of these may be in-situ if the instrument has an environmental chamber.

Characterisation

  • High-resolution SEM with EDS (elemental info) and EBSD (microstructural info) for length scales from mm to nm.
  • Focused ion beam (FIB) cross-sectioning combined with the above SEM, EDS, and EBSD techniques for characterising internal/buried structures for length scales from mm to nm. FIB serial sectioning can be used to reconstruct 3D volumes (up to hundreds of µm in multiple dimensions) containing information from SEM, EDS, and/or EBSD.
  • High-resolution (S)TEM combined with EDS (elemental info), EELS (chemical/oxidation state info), and/or 4D-STEM (microstructural info) for Length scales from µm down to atomic resolution. in situ heating studies, up to ~1000°C, can be conducted on small volumes (nanoparticles or FIB lift-outs) with nanoscale resolution.

References
https://www.nrel.gov/hpc/kestrel-system-configuration
https://sam.nrel.gov/
https://www.nrel.gov/materials-science/materials-synthesis-characterization

Technical Equipment

Please refer to this webpage for a summary of equipment: https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy13osti/58532.pdf

Additional information

Technology Readiness Level: 4-6

Special considerations: N/A 

Technology clusters: Biofuels

Website: https://www.nrel.gov/bioenergy/tcpdu.html

Availability: All year

Provision of tools to prepare data sets in a FAIR way:  Yes 

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