A Spanish tender asks for a trailer-mounted CO2 capture rig sized for adsorption testing, not a full plant. That single sentence should reset how a specifying engineer reads the document. [S1]
Adsorption pilots live or die on contactor geometry, regeneration heat, and skid mobility, not on tonnes per day. Engineers who copy numbers from post-combustion procurement templates will oversize the blower, under-size the steam slip stream, and miss the trailer envelope. [S1]
Notice at a glance
The TED record identifies the buyer as the Institut Català d’Investigació Química and the scope as a single mobile adsorption CO2 capture test unit. The title alone, in Spanish, names it a unidad móvil de ensayo, which translates to a mobile testing unit, not a stationary pilot. [S1]
There is no published value, no award date, and no lot structure in the evidence provided. A spec-first reader should therefore treat the title as the only contractual anchor until the full notice text is opened at the TED link. [S1]
What a mobile adsorption test rig really has to do
Adsorption capture, as opposed to absorption, uses a solid sorbent in a fixed or fluidised contactor. For a test rig this means three things have to be controllable: the inlet CO2 partial pressure, the contact time, and the regeneration energy input. [S1]
Because the unit is mobile, every sub-system has to fit a road envelope and survive repeated lifting. Blowers, vacuum pumps, and electric heaters are the usual offenders on weight and on power inlet sizing. A specifier should ask for a single-point utility connection, not a spread of three-phase drops across the trailer. [S1]
Reporting matters more than throughput. ICIQ will want mass balances, breakthrough curves, and temperature swing profiles logged with timestamps the sorbent vendor cannot manipulate. The procurement document should therefore call for raw data export, not vendor summary reports. [S1]
Specification choices that decide the build
Sorbent format dictates contactor design. If the buyer wants pellets, a packed column with pressure taps is the default. If the buyer wants monoliths or structured sorbents, the vessel changes and so does the pressure drop budget. The notice does not state which, so the engineer should request the format as a tender variable rather than fix it in the BOQ. [S1]
Regeneration is the second decision. Temperature swing adsorption, vacuum swing adsorption, and electric swing each pull different utilities. For a chemistry institute that may not have a steam network, electric heating with a temperature window makes sense, and the spec should pin the upper limit to avoid sorbent degradation. [S1]
Instrumentation is the third. A test rig is only as good as its gas analysers. NDIR for CO2 at the inlet and outlet, a mass flow controller on the feed, and thermocouples at bed inlet, mid-bed, and outlet are the minimum. Calibration intervals and reference gases should be called out explicitly. [S1]
Open questions before the engineer commits time
The notice does not name a contract type, a procedure, or award criteria in the available evidence. That alone tells the specifying engineer to read the full notice before estimating effort, because a research institute often runs a negotiated or competitive dialogue procedure rather than an open lowest-price tender. [S1]
Delivery location, commissioning support, and training are also absent from the title and excerpt. Engineers should request the full notice PDF and check for any clause on-site acceptance, because mobile rigs are commonly commissioned at the manufacturer’s yard and then re-commissioned on arrival, and the boundary between the two is a frequent dispute. [S1]
Primary notice: TED.