Research and Development Log

A selection of some interesting research and development protects we have undertaken over the past few years.

2014

Test Rig

Training Area One (of at least ten), with array of biomass including pellet boilers, wood gasification boiler, wood burner, heat pump, solar thermal feed, and a thermal store at the heart feeding onto loads.

Factory Plant Room, with twin pellet boilers, hopper, and external boiler connection point.

Factory Test Room, with variable volume buffer store, testing areas, and HIU running factory heating and hot water.

Design and build of test rig

Testing is the basis of development, and in order to test system properly you need a decent test rig.

In 2014 we decided it was time to design and install more advanced test facilities on our factory that were capable of investigation as well as simple product testing.

We had plans to see what can be done with the latest open-source electronics, to look into biomass boiler efficiencies, and to push the envelope on district heating design. Our sister company across the road, Specflue, runs the countries largest biomass and renewables RHI training centre, and as such had a large array of boilers to connect up as working system, both to heat the buildings and run the training courses on.

Their training centre design has been designed, built and extended around have the goal of having one of everything, rather than your typical heating system, with 5 permanent biomass heat sources, solar thermal, a heat pump, and a few temporary ones when testing new boilers. Also, radiators and underfloor heating as well as an assortment of buffer stores from the small ones to the big ones, to rectangular ones - all selected to provide installers with the best quality training we can. See Training Courses. In summary, a perfect challenge for testing kit our systems on, alongside the factory rig, for training and demonstrating the states of the arts. Our end of the Specflue rig was designing the control philosophy, thermal store design and build, and monitoring/control applications.

Our own factory test rig, was not so much aimed at having an array of permanent installations, but rather a solid but challenging plant room, a working heating system that could enable load testing, a single buffer that allowed us to vary its effective volumes, and a testing area that allowed just about any system to be easily connected up.

For plant room we went for a twin biomass pellet boiler system that would need to allow for a portable cabinet boiler house to plug in externally. The easiest approach would be gas LPG boilers, but that would not give us the test rig needed to advance understanding of biomass and the control systems for them. We also wanted to go for RHI, for educational than financial reasons - we wanted to be able to improve and teach exactly how best to setup and operate a small scale biomass plantroom on district heating.

The rig has been in use now for over 2 years, and is invaluable to all aspects of out research, development, and training. It is in our view a jewel in the industry, and one we are trying to use as a basis for setting up the UKs first approved installer courses for district heating - currently there are none and general installation quality in the industry is ghastly. We wish to do something about that, as it benefits us as manufacturers when our equipment is installed and maintained properly.

2015

Arduino and Linux embedded control systems

Researching various open source electronics platforms
Researching software language options Python/PHP/Linux
Development of software code
Implementation of various types of sensor
Investigation into use of spectral analysis on captured images

Biomass efficiencies and monitoring

Investigation of boiler efficiency
Investigation as to correlations between sensor inputs and efficiency
Test rig development
Spectral analysis of hopper fuel levels
Software design for monitoring