When Dr. Scott Sinquefield arrived at IPST in 1998, his first task was to oversee the acquisition and installation of a Pressurized Entrained Flow Reactor (PEFR) purchased from a Danish national research laboratory.   Initially installed at IPST’s Industrial Engineering Center on 14th Street, it was dismantled and moved again to Georgia Tech’s new NIST-funded Carbon Neutral Energy Solutions (C-NES) Laboratory.  The PEFR is designed to create a controlled environment of temperature, pressure, gas composition, and residence time, allowing fundamental and applied research in pyrolysis, gasification, and combustion of solid fuels.   There are perhaps ten similar reactors world-wide, owned by universities or government research laboratories, and IPST’s is by far the largest allowing long fuel particle residence times—on the order of 30 seconds.  Initially the PEFR was used to study pyrolysis and gasification of black liquor (after being dried and ground into a powder).  Years later its use was expanded into research on a variety of agricultural and forest biomasses, mill sludge, and coal.

Since 2001, Dr. Sinquefield has been the principal investigator overseeing the PEFR, and a smaller atmospheric pressure Laminar Entrained Flow Reactor (LEFR).    These reactors are ideally suited for taking reaction rate data to build kinetic models as well as other parametric studies.  Considerable work was done to develop kinetic models for pressurized black liquor gasification.  The PEFR was also used to study and develop titanate and borate direct causticizing chemistries to perform the causticizing process simultaneously during black liquor gasification.   Current PEFR research includes fundamental studies of pyrolysis and gasification of loblolly pine, switchgrass, bagasse, corn stover, and lignite coal.

Dr. Sinquefield’s other past and present research projects include:

• Development of a sulfur-tolerant CO2 sorbent (patent pending) that works at gasifier temperatures.  It is central to a process that allows high yields of hydrogen to be produced without the need for expensive water-gas-shift catalysts and for CO2 to be captured for sequestration.
• Creation of a computer model for predicting precipitate (salt) species from concentrated non-ideal electrolyte solutions.  The primary application was to predict black liquor evaporator scale composition.
• Design of a portable apparatus for evaluating commercial anti-scaling additives on site in the mill (United States Patent 6,978,663).   The impetus was to test and benchmark additives used in black liquor heaters and evaporators, and do so in a matter of hours or days.  Currently, such mill trials take several weeks to perform.  The device can be used in any hot liquid process stream that is subject to scale formation related to heat transfer.

Dr Sinquefield completed his PhD in Chemical Engineering in 1998 at Oregon State University.  He spent three years working with the Multi-Fuel Combustion Group at the Combustion Research Facility at Sandia National Labs (Livermore) where he performed the experimental portion of his thesis research.