Working Group: Sustainable Process Engineering & Chemometrics

Leader: Ao.Univ.-Prof. Univ.-Prof. Dipl.-Ing. Dr.techn. Dr.h.c. ANTON FRIEDL

Sustainable Process Engineering focuses on the use of renewable feedstock to generate sustainable energy carriers and renewable products. The necessary chemical and biochemical processes are investigated at laboratory scale, and accompanied by thorough energy optimisation studies, e.g. pinch technology and heat integration. Current projects focus on the renewable feedstock lignocellulosic biomass for biofuels (ethanol, butanol) and valuable products. Different pre-treatment procedures are being investigated, such as hot water extraction, steam treatment, organosolv process or ionic liquids. In various biorefinery concepts, the further processing of the lignocellulosic biomass to a variety of products is evaluated.

Chemometrics is the science of extracting information from chemical systems by data-driven means. It is a highly interfacial discipline, as it relies on data from chemistry/chemical engineering and employs multivariate mathematical/statistical methods. We address problems in chemical engineering that are highly complex, include many variables, and cannot be described sufficiently only by theory.

CORE COMPETENCES

• Thermal process engineering (membrane processes, rectification, absorption)
• Chemical, biotechnological and environmental applications of thermal separation processes
• Biorefinery
• Energy optimisation of processes applying pinch technology and heat integration
• Multivariate data analysis and process optimisation
• Chemometrics, chemoinformatics

Find more information about our research activities: thvt.at and an overview of chemometrics research www.lcm.tuwien.ac.at