Energy

Depleting oil reserves have encouraged the development of technologies to harness the natural resources to sustain the energy needs. Renewable lignocellulosic biomasses have been focus of many studies but advances in the purification and recovering of the products from the product medium has been...

Current-voltage characterization was carried out on dye sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) with different photoanode areas ranging from 0.01 cm 2 to 1 cm 2 . Surprisingly, we found that the short-circuit current density and the efficiency of the solar cells increased exponentially as the photoaonode...

Hydrolysates from dilute acid pretreatment of biomass contain various biomass degradation products which are inhibitory to enzymes and toxic to microorganisms. One of the main inhibitory compounds is acetic acid which is released from the lignin-hemicellulose matrix in the biomass. Acetic acid at...

Sub- and Supercritical Water Based Processes for Conversion of Algae Biomass to Fuels and Green Chemicals – A Review Philip A. Marrone and Bryan V. Yeh Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) 60 Wells Ave, Suite 103 Newton, MA 02459 In recent years, there has been increasing...

In the future, it is anticipated that multi-product biorefineries will be used to convert lignocellulosic biomass to fuels and chemicals, in which, it may be possible to use membrane-based separations to recover fuels and various products and to improve energy efficiency. To biochemically convert...

Imidazoles and imidazole-amine hybrids are unique classes of organic solvents that feature properties similar to aqueous amine solvents and ionic liquids (ILs), both of which have received a great deal of attention for CO2 capture applications. However, to date, the utility of the imidazole...

Ammonia Borane (AB), with high hydrogen storage capacity (19.5 wt.%), is predicted to be possibly a future fuel for providing pure H 2 to fuel cell at room temperature for on-board and portable applications. However, a heterogeneous catalyst plays a vital role for first initiating and then...

Transient heat transfer is analyzed numerically for a directly-irradiated solar thermochemical reactor realizing a ceria-based partial redox cycle for production of synthesis gas from water and carbon dioxide. The numerical model couples conduction, convection, and radiation heat transfer modes to...

Accidental fires in wood pellets silos happen frequently in the last five years. Experiments were carried out in this work at temperature range of 100 o C to 200 o C to study wood pellets chemical oxidation process. A self-heating model was developed to simulate the self-heating process using the...

Biodiesel is a renewable, carbon-neutral fuel that can ease pressure on the world’s dwindling supply of oil and petroleum diesel. This research explores production of biodiesel from alternative low-value feedstocks such as waste oils. Traditional biodiesel reactions mix an alcohol and a refined...