Red Lion Controls in pioneering environmental project
Red Lion Controls is helping US environmental company Enviro-Energy with their first “biomass” system, a bio-waste system for treating and converting farm waste into energy units such as electricity, heat and fertile soil additives.
Enviro-Energy’s biomass “waste-to-energy” system is designed for use in the agricultural community and enables manure to be processed to generate electrical energy. An added benefit of the system is that the resulting water-based product, once spread on a field, permits cattle to commence grazing again almost immediately, unlike traditional systems where cattle must be kept off the field for 28 days. The system works by pumping the raw manure into premix tanks where it is heated to 100ºF and then pumped to reactors where it is broken down. The resulting methane gas generated in the reactors is supplied to the engine which powers the generator to make the electricity to heat the hot water for the pre-mix tank. A control centre determines whether the hot coolant from the engine goes to the pre-mix tanks, the hot water supply tanks or conventional radiators.
Controlling the entire operation is an input-output panel which monitors the system. There are over 150 sensor inputs into this panel which are monitoring, for example, the temperature in every tank and reactor, how full each tank and reactor is, the engine condition, power output and many other conditions. The panel can be contacted via a modem and monitored from any remote location. Red Lion Controls supplies the Modular Controller which accepts all of the various signal inputs, and performs closed-loop control where required. It also communicates the information back to the central control panel via Ethernet. Providing the information via a single Ethernet cable is much more cost effective than wiring all of the sensors directly to the central control panel.
The main product from the system is electricity, which is sent to the power company, with the stabilised water product supplied back to the farmer once all the methane gas has been given off.