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EXC 236:  Tailor-Made Fuels from Biomass

Subject Area Fluid Mechanics, Technical Thermodynamics and Thermal Energy Engineering
Process Engineering, Technical Chemistry
Term from 2007 to 2018
Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 39030946
 
Final Report Year 2020

Final Report Abstract

TMFB was established in 2007 as a new research area at RWTH Aachen on basis of the disciplinary strengths in chemistry, bio- and chemical engineering, and combustion engineering, involving researchers from the Faculty of Natural Sciences, and the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, together with partners from the Fraunhofer Institute for Molecular Biology and Applied Ecology (Aachen) and the Max Planck Institute für Kohlenforschung (Mühlheim). TMFB’s integrated, interdisciplinary approach defines a unique profile among the rapidly growing number of international activities, which focus either on biomass conversion or on combustion research. Realizing the long-term fundamental scientific challenges of its vision, TMFB’s objectives of the first phase were the establishment of a broad dedicated set of experimental and numerical methods to enable the fuel design process, the generation of high-quality data and information to validate the concepts, and the implementation of scientific and organizational measures to integrate biofuel production and combustion research for the identification of new fuel candidates. The individual results demonstrate convincingly the potential of the interdisciplinary approach, leading to the following conclusions: (1) medium-size oxygen-containing molecules provide promising fuel components, and their molecular diversity can be exploited in a model-assisted fuel design process; (2) novel selective (bio-)chemical transformation processes of lignocellulosic biomass can be developed for the synthesis of such target structures from cellulose and hemicellulose; (3) the combustion of these fuels is nearly free of soot and nitrogen oxide emissions, and the efficiency particularly of spark-ignited combustion can be increased significantly; (4) new methods for conceptual process design and evaluation of alternative production pathways prove the potential for a positive overall energy balance. With the establishment and validation of the new methodologies and the integration of the collaborative network, scientific progress gained full momentum leading to over 550 peer reviewed publications, including collaborative papers in high impact journals. The pioneering role of the Cluster is also confirmed by more than 100 invited keynote and plenary lectures specifically on the TMFB-approach at highly ranked international conferences, and by the International Conference on Fuel Science established by TMFB which attracts over 150 international experts from industry and research institutions each year. Researchers at different stages of their career received highly renowned recognitions and fellowships, including the Alexander-von-Humboldt-Professorship (Matthias Wessling), the Robert-Bosch-Junior Professorship (Regina Palkovits), the Sofia Kovalevskaja Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Roberto Rinaldi), and the Wöhler-Award of the German Chemical Society (Leitner, 2009; Schüth, 2011).

Link to the final report

https://doi.org/10.2314/KXP:1742747744

Publications

 
 

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