Sustainable aviation fuel from thermocatalytic refining of lignin and lignin-derivatives: development of biorefinery catalysts and reaction systems

This research aims to develop a cost-effective and efficient lignin refining technology as an alternative for petroleum refinery, with the goal of sustainable supply of renewable jet fuel components which are currently obtained from fossil resources.

For this, new, low-cost and efficient biorefinery catalysts will be designed to overcome the existing technical barriers such as high formation of solid residues as well as low yield and poor quality of lignin-derived liquid oil.

Our catalyst design strategy will be to divide the process into four reaction steps and to develop catalysts highly efficient for each individual step, and then to combine the required catalyst properties and design a catalytic system which can effectively work for one-pot conversion of lignin materials.

In addition to catalytic activity measurements, this project will contain thorough characterization of the developed catalysts, upscaling to continuous mode, process optimization and catalytic stability tests.