The MSU ADREC provides a platform for multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional, and multi-national collaborations to develop sustainable waste-to-resource solutions for the world. MSU is the first campus in the U.S. that has a full range of anaerobic digestion research and development capacities from lab scale, pilot scale all the way to commercial scale. The pilot and demonstration systems at ADREC include: 1) Two 100 L CSTR anaerobic bioreactors; 2) Four 300 L CSTR anaerobic bioreactors; 3) Two 40 L pilot-scale race-way algal reactors; 4) One 100 L algal turf scrubber reactor; 5) A pilot solar bio-powered waste utilization unit; 6) One 950 m3 plug-flow anaerobic digester; 7) One 1,300 m2 race-way algal cultivation unit; 8) One 1,700 m3 CSTR anaerobic digester with 8,700 m2 post-digester/storage tank and 0.4 MW combined heat and power unit.
Location of ADREC and MSU campus digester and open-pond algae cultivation
MSU campus digester
ADREC building
MSU south campus anaerobic digester
Pilot solar-bio-nano wastewater treatment unit
Inside the pilot solar-bio-nano wastewater treatment unit
The research group has two pilot-scale algae cultivation systems on MSU campus. A 1,600 m2 raceway open pond for demonstration-scale algal cultivation located at MSU ADREC is used to carry out algae ecology study and pilot algae cultivation of wastewater treatment and direct-air capture. A 100 L photobioreactor system located at the MSU T.B. Simon Power Plant is used to develop new carbon capture and utilization technologies for power industry.
Pilot open-pond algae cultivation unit
The algae cultivation enclosure at the power plant
Photobioreactor in the enclosure at the power plant
The pilot wastewater treatment/utilization site is located at East Lansing water resource recovery facility. The pilot site has a capacity of handling up to 20,000 gallon wastewater per day, and is used to develop and test next-generation wastewater treatment and utilization technologies.
The pilot wastewater treatment/utilization site at East Lansing water resource recovery facility
A pilot treatment system
The Bioenergy laboratory is located at Farrall hall. Major equipment in the laboratory include: shakers, incubators, fermentors, photobioreactors, thermal reactor, microscope, spectrophotometers, HPLC, GC, LC-MS, PCR thermal cycler, qPCR, electrophoresis unit, and imaging system.
10 L photobioreactors
2 L photobioreactors
Thermo MaxQ shakers
Eppendorf Mastercycler® pro Thermal Cyclers & Bio-rad electriphoresis
Shimadzu LC-MS
Nikon Eclipse 50i Microscope
Shimadzu spectrophotometer
UVP DigiDoc-It™ Imaging System
Shimadzu HPLC
Shimadzu GC
Incubators
Stirred ball mill unit with a heating unit