Biogas Generator

If you want to produce power from biogas, you’ve visited the right place.

If you wanted to learn about producing biogas instead of power generation from biogas, have a look at generating biogas and covered anaerobic lagoons.

Inoplex: Australian Biogas Engine Manufacturers

A Biogas Generator is made up of 3 main components; the biogas engine or power plant, the generator that is coupled with the engine and controller. The controller is a small component that makes the world of difference to the overall system performance.

Unlike standard generators running from Petrol, Diesel or LPG/Natural Gas, a biogas generator needs to be able to handle a range of different gas qualities. The biogas production process in an anaerobic digester isn’t practically able to create a consistent quality of gas. The Inoplex biogas generator can handle lower quality and more variable biogas than most of our competitors.

Biogas Engine Selection

The team at Inoplex have selected a range of commercially available and well proven engines that we convert to suit biogas. These include:

Small 

For 2 to 30 KW we recommend the durable Kubota engines.

Medium

For 10 to 66 KW with the lowest possible maintenance cost, we use a Ford Barra engine.

Large

For 200 to 360 KW we utilise Scania engines for reliability and leading efficiency 

for 500  to 2,000 KW we use Siemens engines as best in class.

We offer well proven engines from 2 KW to 2 MW, all ready for biogas applications.

These engines are offered as fixed speed synchronous generators and for maximum efficiency and lowest total lifecycle cost, we also offer them as variable speed. 

Generators to suit your application

Inoplex will match a generator to suit your application and most appropriate engine, or prime mover. Our range of generators includes:

48 VDC for renewable, battery and telecommunications applications

230 VAC for single phase 50 Hz smaller scale applications such as farms and home sites

415 VAC three phase 50 Hz for larger applications. These are readily grid synchronised for paralleling with the grid or even exporting excess power to the grid.

Permanent magnet generators, PMG or PMA, suitable for use with inverters.

This range of alternators or generators is matched specifically suit your project.

Generator Contollers

A generator or combined heat and power generator running on biogas needs a robust controller to reliably operate. This is especially important if you are planning on running the generator with the local power grid.

Many commercial off the shelf generator controllers will start and run a biogas generator, but typically not with the reliability clients expect. They fail to perform when variably quality fuel and grid synchronisation into the equation.

The electrical engineering team at Inoplex has settled on Sices controllers, AC DC and Hybrid controllers. We also use Siemens S7 industrial PLC for the highest level of reliability.

Common Biogas Generator Issues

Variable or low quality Biogas

Biogas production is not a completely controlled process like petrol refining etc and therefore results in variable biogas quality. In unfavourable conditions, the biogas quality can be that low that a normal biogas generator can’t operate or if it did, would cause potential maintenance issues from running rough.

It also means that that biogas engine will run at variable speed, so the generator needs to be decoupled to handle this.

Biogas is corrosive

The components that make up biogas are extremely corrosive. In fact, one of the main components is Hydrogen Sulphide (H2S). For this reason, biogas generators need to include some form of H2S Scrubber to remove as much as it can. However, this still means that a biogas engine needs to handle this corrosive nature and maintenance can be an issue.

How do Inoplex Biogas Generators handle this?

Inoplex have developed both the biogas engine and the generator to overcome or minimise these issues. The way we have achieved this is:

Low cost, efficient Biogas Engine

Unlike most other biogas engine manufacturers, we believe the biogas engine should be a low cost consumable. No matter how good the quality of the biogas engine is, it still needs to handle the corrosiveness of biogas as well as the ability to run at low biogas levels. 

If you’ve spent a lot of your budget on a high end biogas engine, you’ll be extremely reluctant to run it when the biogas levels are low and the engine will run rough. With our low cost biogas engine, you can afford to run it rough at low biogas levels knowing that if it finally gives up you can easily afford to replace it. Over the life of the project, your overall return on investment will be higher thanks to increased electricity generation from longer running times. Not to mention, lower maintenance costs.

We believe in spending your budget where the real benefits are, a high quality inverter generator with power electronics.

Inverter Generator

By combining our biogas engine with an inverter generator with power electronics, we can generate clean power at any engine speed. So even if your biogas engine is only just running, you will still be generating clean power.

Find out more about the Inoplex Cogen Generator.