Hennepin County Resource Recovery Facility

A 1,200 tons‐per‐day waste‐to‐energy facility has been constructed in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and has been in operation since October 1989. Trucks deliver municipal solid waste (MSW) to the facility, are weighed, then discharge their loads into the seven‐day capacity refuse bunker. Two manually operated cranes mix and charge the refuse into two furnace feed hoppers. The turbine generator is capable of producing approximately 38.12 MW when the plant is burning 1,212 tons per day of “design” waste. The facility consists of two identical processing trains, each capable of burning 606 tons of MSW per day. Each of the two process trains includes a combustion air system, a grate system, a boiler, and atomizing spray dryer, a baghouse, an induced draft fan, a stack flue and, other auxiliary equipment. A distributed digital control system provides for single operator plant control. The paper describes each of the major plant systems, the plant performance design data and some of the design philosophies that governed the plant design.