Energy

Research within the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center aims to better understand the bottlenecks associated with bioconversion of lignocellulose to liquid transportation fuels, knowledge which will then be used to improve the efficiency of this process. Much of these studies are currently...

Poly(oxymethylene) Dimethyl Ethers as components of tailored diesel fuel - properties, synthesis and purification concepts Jakob Burger 1* , Markus Siegert 2 , Eckhard Ströfer 2 , Michael Nilles 2 , Hans Hasse 1 1 Laboratory of Engineering Thermodynamics, University of Kaiserslautern, Germany; 2...

Glycerol produced as a waste product in biodiesel production has interesting potential as a low-cost biomass-derived feedstock for chemical processing. A process of current academic and commercial interest is the acid-catalyzed dehydration of glycerol to acrolein, a valuable platform chemical. Such...

Over one fifth of calories consumed by humanity are from rice. Consequently, vast quantities of rice hulls are disposed of as waste, since the hull constitutes 20% of rice mass. Standard practice for disposal of rice hulls is burning, generating pollution and CO 2 , or thrown away in vast...

Argonne’s Model for Universal Solvent Extraction (AMUSE) simulates multi-stage aqueous solvent extraction processes for components of interest to spent nuclear fuel reprocessing. The current work has incorporated time dependency into the simulation; the original AMUSE program was used for steady-...

Dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs), while only having been designed about twenty years ago, are considered to be one of the most promising third-generation solar cell technologies among experts. One of the key features of DSSCs is a mesoporous, 10 micron layer of titania nanoparticles which acts as...

Some processes aimed to biofuels production, use lignocellulosic wastes as feedstocks for fermentative conversion. If this is the case, pretreatment is required to make these resources fully digestible. Among a wide range of pretreatment options, this study focuses and compares oxidative-alkaline...

The US Air Force has committed to an alternative aviation-fuel initiative to implement a roadmap for testing and certifying alternative fuel components including biomass-derived alternatives produced from non-food plants, animal fats, and algae, as well as synthetic fuel components derived from...

Three classes of nonfouling substances, poly[poly(ethylene glycol) methyl ether methacrylate] (POEM), poly(sulfobetaine methacrylate) (PSBMA), and perfluoroalkyl tagged poly(ethylene glycol) surfactants (fPEG), were covalently tethered onto the surface of Anopore TM membranes (nominal pore size 0.2...

Oil sands operations in Alberta are poised to experience significant growth over the next number of years. Production of 1.31 million bbl/day of synthetic crude oil and bitumen blends from oil sands in 2008 is projected to increase to over 3 million bbl/day by 2018. This guarantees a large output...