We are making progress! The good people over at North Carolina Fire Protection just finished installing the sprinkler system for the biodiesel facility. Here's a snapshot of a couple sections of their handiwork.
Nick recently fired up the refurbished glass furnace in the room next door, which houses
STARworks Glass. While he was working on the furnace during its annual maintenance period, he added a flange on the stack of the furnace. Check out the groovy stainless steel welding he did in the pic below.
It might be a little difficult to see the flange at the top of the furnace's exhaust stack in the picture, but this will facilitate the attachment of a heat exchanger to the furnace. We are really excited about this part of the project because it will make our energy utilization in the biodiesel production significantly less than most facilities of this size. We will use the waste energy from the glass furnace, which runs year-round, to heat a water/glycol mix that will be stored in an insulated tank, then distributed to our feedstock and reactor tanks. Otherwise, we would probably be using electric heaters to aid in the settling of the veg oil and heating the reactor tank to the proper temp for optimal reaction. I will be posting more pictures as the process heat system development progresses.
No comments:
Post a Comment