Currently there are several organisations in Italy:

aso. Terre (Andrea, Simone, Paolo …)

aso. Revitae (Saverio, Paolo, Stefano, Giulia, ..)

And several independent people like Mara, doing research in Politecnico di Milano.

The first project that has been done together last year was the taking apart and rebuilding of the cubic biomeiler of Paolo Dallai, he will explain more about the results himself.

Davide from Treviso visited the last conference and from what he learned there he build his own biomeiler to try the technique. With an external heat exchanger and passive aeration from the bottom. It worked for a short period, mainly because of the cold winter and high drying rate of the biomass. There was low water penetration from the rain, so they wetted it in november and this caused a short increase in temperature.

Andrea did a second project in Pisa to make a heating for two houses with an insulated heat storage. The average power output was about 2,6 kW by oscillating the pumping speed. 15 min. turned on and 45 min. off. The total power output was about 1870 kWh/month. The total running time was 12 months. It is hard to say if the whole period had the same power collection because there had been problems with the electronics during part of the measurement period. The temperature of the water coming from each layer was up to about 63-75°C. It was very hard to match the circuit of the biomeiler to the heating installation of the houses, so only after a long time the heat could be used. The compost from the old biomeiler was reduced 30% in volume

Mara, Simone, Andrea did a research project in Padova for her master thesis. They tried a new layout with a flexible membrane biogas plant into the middle of the biomeiler. More information will follow.

Paolo did a theoretic numerical model for all thermodynamic processen in the biomeiler. He worked one year on it for his MSc Thesis and Carlos will continue his work. The model gives rough results, but it needs more work and practical data to check the validity. There are so very many variables that it is very hard to model everything. Qualitatively it is very useful, but don’t trust the quantitative data yet.