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Pörner’s Biturox® Bitumen Research Center is the renowned service provider for the development of tailor-made quality bitumen from various crude oil and refinery feedstock. State-of-the-art laboratory, technical research and development facilities, and the latest analytical methods have made it possible for Pörner to be number 1 in bitumen production worldwide.
Since the 1990s, Pörner has operated a Biturox® pilot plant for practical trials with feedstock or compositions of several components in batch or continuous mode. The results of the pilot tests are used as design basis for Biturox® plants. The customer can produce bitumen reference samples from defined feed compositions ready for further applied tests.
All results of basic and applied research, the experience gained during design, construction, commissioning and Biturox® plants, the feedback from the Biturox® licensees, the current results of the Biturox® Enhancement Technique (chemical upgrading of bitumen) and, of course, the performance reports on the application of Biturox® bitumen are collected in a comprehensive database at Pörner.
Many bitumen research institutions attribute the origin of the crude oil as the decisive factor for good bitumen quality, failing to recognize and examine the possibilities that lie in the chemical modification of almost unlimited variety of crude oil derived feedstock.
The main objective of Biturox® product development is therefore to optimize product quality by using the right feedstock, controlling operating conditions and the optimum chemical composition of bitumen.
In more than 40 years, Pörner, in cooperation with its partners in the oil industry, has performed several hundred tests in bitumen laboratories as well as pilot tests with a wide range of crude oils and has developed methods for the formulation and processing of bitumen in a very selective way. All results are stored in a knowledge database.
This enables Pörner to recommend the most efficient and economical way of producing high-quality bitumen for almost any feedstock and product – especially from unconventional, cheaper feedstock components.
The new Biturox® pilot plant 2.0 is equipped – for greater flexibility – with two reactors of different batch sizes, a smaller one of about 7.5 liters and a larger one of 15 liters to produce reference samples. The laboratory is equipped with the basic measuring instruments for determining penetration and softening points, among others. Furthermore, Pörner invested in a high shear mixer to produce test quantities of polymer-modified bitumen (PmB).
The Biturox® pilot plant planned and built by Pörner in the 1990s was set up in the OMV bitumen laboratory. In 2022, Pörner decided to develop its own Biturox® product development laboratory in Schwechat. To enable even more targeted, faster processing of product development orders by Pörner specialists, independent of external resources. The Biturox® pilot plant 2.0 was completed at the end of 2022.
