Business areas

Pilot Plants

End-to-end development of piloting and technology scale-up projects, from the conceptualisation of new processes and the definition of their validation strategy to the design, construction and operation of pilot plants for their demonstration and industrialisation.

CADE designs, builds and operates pilot and demonstration plants that validate new technologies at scale and generate the data that the investor and the future industrial plant need.

Technology centres and universities that need an experimental facility, companies developing their own process that have to demonstrate it at scale, and R&D consortia that need a partner to design, build and operate the plant.

Clients

Technology and research centresUniversitiesTechnology-based companiesR&D consortiaProcess industry

Sectors

Energy storageHydrogen and renewable gasesChemicals and processesWaste valorisationSolar thermal

How it is developed

From concept to industrialisation

We approach piloting the other way round: first we define the data the industrial plant needs and then we design the pilot plant capable of obtaining it. We cover all three phases, together or separately.

Design and development

We study the scalability of the process, define what the pilot plant has to demonstrate and size it; if the goal is a pre-commercial reference, we design the demonstration plant.

Scalability studies
Pilot plant design
Demonstration plants

Engineering and integration

We develop the process and detailed engineering of plants with pressure equipment, high temperatures and instrumentation from every discipline, and we fabricate and integrate them in our Innovation Factory in Albacete.

Process engineering
Fabrication and integration

Validation and industrialisation

We commission the plant, define and run the test campaigns and transfer the results to the design of the industrial plant.

Commissioning and validation
Industrialisation

References

CADE's pilot and demonstration plants

Facilities that CADE has designed, built or integrated to validate its own and third-party technologies.

Thermal storage · CIIAE

Pilot plant of the Iberian Centre for Research in Energy Storage (CIIAE), in Cáceres, for testing molten salts, phase change materials, solids and adsorbents. CADE is responsible for the supply, installation and commissioning.

Solar steam with storage · EDITOR

Demonstration plant at a beverage factory in Limassol (Cyprus): a 125 kWt parabolic trough field and a 600 kWh concrete thermal storage system supply steam at 188 °C and 11 bar continuously, including at night. CADE was responsible for the engineering and integration of the system.

Supercritical water gasification · SCWG

Pilot plant for the hydrothermal gasification technology developed by CADE, which converts wet biomass and residual organic streams into renewable gases.

Own technology

Digital twins

Before construction, the digital twin of the pilot plant makes it possible to simulate its behaviour, adjust the design and plan the test campaigns. During operation, it compares real data with the model and helps validate the scale-up. We develop it with our SimulTWIN platform.