Turboden, a Mitsubishi Heavy Industries company and provider of Organic Rankine Cycle turbogenerators for distributed power generation employing renewable sources and waste heat, signed an order with Starwood for a new 5.5-MW cogeneration plant in Bursa, Turkey.

Starwood specializes in producing thin MDF. Every day, Starwood produces 3,300 cubic meters of chipboard and 750 cubic meters MDF in four chipboard production lines.

The Turboden ORC system will produce 5.5 MW of electricity and 29.5 MW of thermal energy. The project is included in a larger plant that calls for the expansion of the Starwood MDF production facility in Bursa.

A 50-MW biomass boiler fed by bark and chipboard production residues will supply heat for the rotary dryer and for the ORC, which will also produce hot water at 90 degrees Celsius (194 degrees Fahrenheit) for dryer purposes.

The ORC turbine, constructed by the new Turboden Turkish daughter company Turboden Turkey ORC Turbo Jeneratör Sanayi Anonim Şirketi recently established in Ankara, will grant Starwood the access to the local content-related additional incentives offered by the Turkish Government for renewable energy generation.

A Turboden local service team, already active in the Turkish territory, will provide on-site works and after-sales services. The integration of the ORC in an MDF production plant is an attractive application because of the potential to produce a portion of the electricity consumption of the plant and to implement cogeneration systems without significant changes to the typical MDF process scheme.

This solution also has the advantage of low operation and maintenance costs and limited additional costs compared to the heat-only solution, leading to an optimal pay back of the additional investment. The effectiveness of this application is confirmed by the decennial operation of the first Turboden ORC unit supplied to an MDF production facility in Austria, Hallein, in operation since 2005.

The Starwood project is the third biomass plant in Turkey for Turboden, after the 1-MW ORC unit supplied to Kastamonu Entegre in Gebze and the 200-kW ORC unit installed in Bursa for Marmarabirlik, another important step in the advancement of Turboden in the Turkish market, not only for geothermal application, but also for biomass exploitation.

Since 2011, Turboden has successfully delivered two 5.3-MW waste-to-energy ORC units to ITC-KA Enerji Üretim Sanayi ve Ticaret A.Ş. in Mamak and a 3-MW geothermal unit to AFJET A.Ş. in Afyonkarahisar.

Two other recent cogeneration power plants have been awarded. A Turboden 5.5-MW CHP plant will be installed at a sawmill and pellet factory in Russia with the Spanish general contractor Prodesa Medioambiente, specialized in the supply of turnkey solutions for pellet production.

In this project, bark and waste branches will feed a thermal oil boiler, coupled with the Turboden ORC unit. The heat generated by the ORC system will feed the drying chambers of the existing sawmill, that will be enlarged, and a pellet production line of 80,000 tons per year.

A further CHP module will be installed in the Philippines—the first large biomass ORC plant in Southeast Asia. The unit will recover thermal power from the combustion of corn cob and rice husk to produce up to 5.8 MW of electricity.

The thermal power discharged by the ORC will be efficiently used to dry cereals. The ORC is flexibly designed to deliver high temperature water during rainy seasons and lower temperature water during dry seasons.

In both projects, the customers will also rely on the capability of the Turboden ORC to work on island mode, i.e. to ensure electricity generation to feed the production process during power failures of the main grid.