Compactor developed by local firm turns plant waste into energy tablets

A Columbia company has built a compacting machine that transforms corn cobs, corn stalks and other plant material into dense tablets that look like big hockey pucks and burn like coal.
Ecologic Tech is an intellectual property licensing firm with seven employees located in an industrial building on McGuire Boulevard, around the corner from the future home of IBM.
Ecologic Tech specializes in building prototypes, and its work is based on the research of civil engineer Henry Liu, who retired from MU in 2000 and died in a car crash last December.

The use of biomass as an alternative energy source has grown rapidly, but most biomass materials such as switch grass or corn are bulky when collected, costly to handle, store and transport.
Ecologic Tech has built a small, electrically powered machine that compresses biomass into tablets without having to use heat or a binder, said Jesse VanEngelenhoven, Ecologic Tech’s research director. The firm has been funded by two $100,000 grants from the federal departments of agriculture and energy.

The prototype now being tested at the MU Bradford Farm Research and Extension Center produces tablets about six inches across and an inch and a half thick. It’s capable of processing a few hundred pounds of biomass per hour.
VanEngelenhoven said the company expects to find out within a month whether it has won a second Department of Energy grant that would fund the construction of a commercial-sized tablet-making machine capable of processing two to three tons of biomass per hour.
The tablets could be mixed with coal to provide fuel for turbines that generate electricity or used on their own to heat buildings. The primary markets would be power plants and ethanol plants, and the machines or the rights to build the machines would be licensed by Ecologic Tech.
The key to producing the tablets is obtaining a ‘happy spot” where the tablet is dense enough to hold together and durable, yet loose enough for air to enter when placed in a fire, VanEngelenhoven said.
Ideally, biomass material could be bought from local farmers turning the biomass waste into useable energy form. “All the waste that farmers would normally throw away could be brought to a central processing center, compacted and then sold as a value-added product,” he said.
“This would open markets for local agricultural products,” said Tim Reinbott, Bradford Farm supervisor. “This could directly affect Missouri farmers.”
“With these bulk materials, transportation is expensive,” Reinbott said. “You want something that is within a 25- to 30-mile radius to be economical. If you had a machine that could be mobile, then you could condense the biomass onsite.”
Liu’s initial goal was to develop underground pipe transit to ship coal after it had been compacted into condensed logs, and the company was originally called Freight Pipeline Company. While researching that technology, Liu managed to translate the compacting process into the production of bricks made of the ash left over from burning coal.
Liu, familiar with fly ash from his work at the university’s coal-fired power plant, began researching and developing the first fly ash brick. The company has since licensed the brick-making technology to CalStar Products, which launched early this year.