Continuous, Fluid-powered, Slurry Feeding into High-pressure, High-temperature Environments Using Teledyne Isco Syringe Pumps
Supercritical fluids provide unique opportunities for processing and separations of biomass and other carbo- naceous materials. Continuous operation, rather than batch processing, is necessary for supercritical fluid technology to be used on a large scale. This application note describes a novel feeder capable of feeding a variety of high-solids slurries into high-pressure (and high-temperature) environments for processing with supercritical fluids. The feeder operates continuously and allows precise measurement of feeding rates for research purposes. Teledyne Isco 260D syringe pumps are essential parts of the experiential apparatus used in the investigation, which is located in the Carbon Recy- cling Center in the Department of Biological Engineering at the University of Missouri. The pumps provide fluid power to drive a piston accomplishing positive displace- ment of slurry. The feeder is a dual node design, each node operating semi-continuously so that both nodes together operate continuously. This feeder is currently used on a laboratory scale, but is amenable to scale up.
Doug Hendry¹, Malithi Wickramathilaka², Nikolas Wilkinson², Andrew Miller¹, Chandrasekar Venkitasamy², and William Jacoby¹ ², Department of Biological Engineering¹, Department of Chemical Engineering², University of Missouri, Columbia, MO
