In Pennsylvania, Lehigh University’s Energy Research Center has been awarded a new $3.5 million project by the Department of Energy for the development of advanced technology for rapid detection and analysis of MSW streams. This project is part of a $34 million effort to support high-impact research and development to improve and produce biofuels, biopower, and bioproducts.
Lehigh will lead a team that includes the Energy Research Company (ERCo), the DOE’s National Energy Technology Laboratory, ThermoChem Recovery International, Covanta Energy, the University of Toledo, and SpG Consulting.
The team will work on streamlining one of the most complex aspects of the waste-to-bioenergy process: analysis of the material. The project will bring together two types of leading-edge spectroscopy, laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) and Raman spectroscopy, in combination with artificial intelligence (AI).
The technology will be designed to provide rapid, in situ characterization of MSW feedstock, providing critical characterization and chemical analysis data for feed-forward process control of downstream biofuel production processes. Together, the hardware and software elements will be capable of improving MSW characterization throughput over baseline methods by at least 25 percent. The approach could make it possible to process waste material in minutes instead of hours.
