10:31 a.m., Sept. 10, 2009----The University of Delaware will receive $400,000 over the next four years to conduct research on the conversion of biomass to fuels through the National Science Foundation's Emerging Frontiers in Research and Innovation (EFRI) program.

THIS STORY

E-mail

Print

Twitter

EFRI offers interdisciplinary teams of researchers the opportunity to embark on rapidly advancing frontiers of fundamental engineering research. This year's program funded 43 projects in two areas: BioSensing and BioActuation (BSBA) and Hydrocarbons from Biomass (HyBi).

Dion Vlachos, Elisabeth Inez Kelley Professor of Chemical Engineering at UD, is co-principal investigator on an EFRI-HyBi project led by the University of Minnesota that will investigate the conversion of biomass to fuels using molecular sieve catalysts and millisecond contact time reactors. Only eight HyBi proposals were funded.

While several processes for biomass utilization have been proposed, none meets the productivity, scalability, product distribution, and economic requirements for commercial implementation. The objective of the new research is to develop a continuous and scalable autothermal catalytic process for the “one-pot” conversion of lignocellulosic biomass to fuels using multifunctional catalysts in a short-contact-time stratified reactor.

The work will capitalize on the infrastructure provided by the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota and the Center for Catalytic Science and Technology at UD.

Vlachos is also director of UD's new Catalysis Center for Energy Innovation (CCEI), which is funded by the Department of Energy through its Energy Frontiers Research Centers (EFRC) program.

CCEI is aimed at developing innovative, science-based heterogeneous catalytic technologies for the transformation of biomass materials into fuels, chemicals, and electricity. The EFRI grant complements the work of CCEI by focusing on developing microtechnology to enable distributed biofuels production.

Article by Diane Kukich