Dr. James Dooley, Chief Technology Officer of Forest Concepts, was the co-author of two of the three articles featured on the cover of the January 2013 issue of Biofuels, a leading peer reviewed science and engineering journal published in the U.K.
The special focus issue on advanced feedstocks for advanced biofuels included ten articles and manuscripts. Dooley co-authored with Drs. Kaushlendra Singh and Shahab Sokhansanj an editorial about how scale matters to the utilization of woody biomass.
The other cover story was an original research manuscript authored by Forest Concepts’ engineers Dave Lanning, Chris Lanning, and Jim Dooley. The article titled “Woody biomass size reduction with selective material orientation” details the development of what is now known as the Forest Concepts Crumbles® technology. The work was partially funded by US Department of Energy Office of Biomass Programs to apply the principles of structural biology to minimize energy consumed during comminution of woody biomass into small biofuel feedstock particles. The low energy comminution was achieved by careful understanding of natural modes of failure within wood materials, minimizing energy-intensive cross-grain shearing, processing at high moisture content, and only manipulating each face of the resulting particles only once. Production equipment based on the technology has been demonstrated to consume a fraction of the energy used by hammer mills.
View the story over at Future Science.
