Taylors Farm
From installation to operation
Use the arrows to rotate the gallery. Select an image to open a larger view; the final slide is a site video.
The Taylors Farm bean-roasting plant — Woodtek pyrolysis, Bluebox hot air turbine and Mecmar roaster — is now fully installed and completing commissioning before starting 24/7 operation.
Bean roasting with BB-80
Taylors Farm selected Bluebox Energy, Woodtek and McArthurs to build a revolutionary bean-roasting plant. It uses Woodtek’s pyrolysis C-1000 unit to turn oat hulls into biochar. Heat from that process generates power from Bluebox Energy’s hot air turbine and hot water for the facility’s heating network.
Using computational fluid dynamics, Bluebox designed a system that mixes hot air from the turbine with preheated air to create 800 kW of air at 210 °C. That air feeds a Mecmar grain roaster processing locally grown beans for cattle feed — making them more palatable for the animals and providing an alternative to imported soya.
When the roaster is not in use, the heat is redirected to an ORC to generate additional electricity. It is a world-first and a step toward more sustainable farming.
A short film of the unit when it was leaving Bluebox for installation at Taylor’s Farm is on YouTube.