8:15 a.m., March 4, 2010----James Trainham, senior vice president of engineering for Sundrop Fuels of Colorado, will deliver the Jack A. Gerster Memorial Lecture on solar energy at 10 a.m., Friday, March 19, in Room 102 Colburn Laboratory.

THIS STORY

E-mail

Print

Twitter

The lecture is sponsored by the University of Delaware Department of Chemical Engineering and Trainham will speak on the topic “The Renewable Fuel Challenge: Harnessing the Power of the Sun.”

The U.S. has set a goal of producing 36 billion gallons of renewable fuel by 2020 and Trainham notes that solar upgrading technology in which the chemical energy value of feedstock is enhanced with solar energy can provide cost effective pathway to meeting the challenge.

Solar biomass gasification provides significant advantages over standard thermochemical and biochemical biomass-to-fuels conversion processes, and the use of concentrated solar energy to drive the endothermic gasification reaction allows for nearly all of the biomass to be converted to fuel, effectively doubling the yield from the biomass feedstock. It further avoids production of tars that plague conventional gasification.

Sundrop Fuels, in Louisville, Colo., is taking this approach to produce renewable fuels from biomass. Applying technology licensed from the University of Colorado at Boulder and National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the company has recently commissioned a pilot scale facility. The commercial implementation of this technology is projected to be competitive with today's fossil fuels and will help catalyze growth of the renewable fuels and chemical industries.

Trainham received a bachelor of science degree and doctorate from the University of California Berkeley, and a master's degree from the University of Wisconsin Madison, all in chemical engineering.

At Sundrop Fuels, he is responsible for research and development, engineering design, scale-up, and commercialization of the company's unique gasification technology.

From 2005-2009, Trainham was vice president of science and technology for PPG Industries, Inc. in Pittsburgh with global responsibility for new product and process innovation.

From 1979-2004, Trainham was employed by DuPont, where he led teams that developed a number of new processes, including HFC-134a, which eliminated chlorofluorocarbons from car air conditioners and led to DuPont receiving the National Medal of Technology in 2002.

Trainham was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1997. He received the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) Award in Chemical Engineering Practice in 2002 and was selected as “One of the 100 Chemical Engineers of the Modern Era” by the AIChE in 2008. Trainham has more than 40 publications and patents.