By Editorial Services
Lehigh’s Energy Research Center has commissioned a pilot-scale gasifier at the university’s Mountaintop campus, creating a new research platform for studying how waste materials can be converted into useful energy. The system can process a range of feedstocks, including refuse-derived fuel made from municipal solid waste, waste biomass, waste plastics, and coal refuse, to produce synthetic gas, or syngas, which can then be used to generate electricity.
Available to researchers at Lehigh and other universities as well as industry partners, the facility combines real-time gas monitoring and automated controls with a machine learning-enhanced system that characterizes changing feedstock properties as the gasifier operates. Those capabilities will allow researchers to investigate ways to improve syngas yield and quality while exploring potential energy and environmental applications for difficult-to-manage waste streams.
Read the full story from Lehigh’s Institute for Cyber Physical Infrastructure and Energy (I-CPIE).
