BIOFLEX

Project
The Lochmead Dairy farm in Junction City, Oregon is a modern dairy cattle company, which today covers a large part of its power requirements with renewable Energy.

Since a suitable raw material is close by, in this case cattle manure, biogas can be produced on site to generate electricity that is delivered and sold to the local utility utilizing a proprietary anaerobic digestion process. For this purpose our customer, Revolution Energy Solutions LLC, constructed a biogas plant on the farm property. This plant consists of two digester tanks, an effluent storage tank, and a combined heat and power unit where the fermentation gas is converted into electricity and heat.

For optimum gas production both digesters must be maintained at a constant temperature. To maintain this temperature, external heat is required and is supplied by the cooling water of the power generator. The decision was made to use a wall mounted pipe heating system. After the evaluation of various pipe systems, the BIOFLEX system by BRUGG PIPES selected for its ease of installation and superior heat transfer capability. The BIOFLEX pipe is a
corrugated, flexible pipe made of 316L stainless steel and is made in “endless” lengths. This makes the installation of the pipe considerably faster than any other pipe and eliminates the Need for connections inside the digester that may leak down the road. 

The only connections to the pipe are outside the digester. All of these facts supported the customer’s choice of the BIOFLEX pipe. Before the actual installation, the BIOFLEX system had to be adapted to the specific design of the digester. The digesters at this plant are made of glass‐fused steel sheets
that are bolted together. The supports for the pipe, also made in stainless steel, were designed such that they straddle one sheet height. This way the sheets and the pipe supports could be installed with the same tank bolts.

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