Last month, Iowa State began working with an Ames company to study ways to replace or reduce the natural gas used in making ethanol by gasifying biomass plant material and turning it into useful energy and renewable products.

Frontline BioEnergy, LLC, 2521 Elwood Drive, is a small Ames company that is the Iowa successor of the Colorado-based company Frontline BioEnergy Inc.

The company has been in business for about three years, and has its first commercial scale system currently in Minnesota, said Norman Reese, the company’s general manager.

The main goal of this research is to find a way to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide that is put into the atmosphere and to find an alternative to natural gas, which would save possibly 20 percent on fuel costs in industrial locations, Reese said.

“We want to make use of unused renewable fuels and convert them into something more valuable, while reducing greenhouse gasses,” Reese said. “With natural gas prices so high, it has become viable with our technology to replace natural gas with fuels from renewable biomass sources.”

The research has just begun, and is still in the planning process.

“We officially started only about a month ago, and we are now getting into the design and build stage,” said Theodore Heindel, professor of mechanical engineering.

With computational fluid dynamics, they can examine how possibly changing the gasifier in some way affects it, and see how it helps the overall product or makes it worse, said Francine Battaglia, associate professor of mechanical engineering.

“My research is in computational fluid dynamics,” Battaglia said. “I am working with graduate students using simulations to determine if the numerical codes that were predicted prove to be correct in our experiments.”

The reason they are interested in validation is because it is difficult and expensive to carry out these experiments, and with computational fluid dynamics they can easily and cheaply get more information than an experiment can provide, Battaglia said.

“We are using X-ray visualization equipment to visualize what happens in the gasifier and compare with Dr. Battaglia’s results to help Frontline design better gasifiers,” Heindel said.

Heindel said they are experimenting to make fluidized gas biomass. For example, they will take corn stalk and heat it under pressure in an attempt to replace natural gas in the process of making ethanol.

“We have confidence in our model, however we have just barely begun and we don’t have all the answers yet,” Battaglia said.