Renewable Energy Production and Consumption for Sustainable Goals
A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Energy Sustainability".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (25 October 2023) | Viewed by 283
Special Issue Editor
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
In order to overcome rapid depletion in and pollution concerns regarding conventional fuels, many countries have started researching renewable energy resources which could cause no or negligible pollution to environment. In this process, researchers could conclude that lignocellulosic biomass is the only renewable resource which can provide not only sustainable carbon, but also produce platform chemicals.
The lignocellulosic biomass can be converted to bio-oil through physico-chemical, thermo-chemical and bio-chemical approaches. However, bio-oil obtained through various processes is not suitable for transportation purposes due to inherent difficulties; thus, it has to follow various upgrading approaches. Therefore, in the recent past, several experimental and computational approaches have been developed to achieve required properties of bioenergy: pyrolysis in the presence of different catalysts and catalyst development for upgrading bio-oils such as bimetallic catalysts, zeolites, etc., hydrothermal liquefaction; computational approaches such as density functional theory (DFT) to achieve appropriate reaction mechanisms and reaction kinetics of bio-oil upgrading; and a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) approach to optimize the design and operating conditions of a range of processes which include biomass conversion processes such as pyrolysis, hydrothermal liquefaction, gasification and bio-oil upgrading.
Significant research developments are still required to optimize these processes and several challenges in these research areas are yet to be addressed so that sustainable bioenergy is available to common society at economically feasible price. Although experimental studies are always providing the overall performance of specific processes in terms of yield, conversion and selectively, their corresponding computational studies will provide more detailed insight into the physics of the problem. For instance, experimentally obtaining the reaction kinetics of bio-oil upgrading is a cumbersome process as there exist hundreds of components in bio-oil; however, by using computational tools such as density functional theory (DFT), one can obtain the detailed reaction mechanism as well as the reaction kinetics such as rate constants, activation energy, etc. Further computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is a versatile tool to simulate a variety of complex multiphase reactive turbulent flows such as combustion, gasification, and bio-oil upgrading in a variety of reactor setups over wide ranges of operating conditions, which could help researchers delineate the overall broad picture of problem. This will further be useful in making recommendations of optimized reactors and operating conditions of the process. Thus, this Special Issue aims to attract research papers, short communications and state-of-the-art review articles addressing the aforementioned challenges.
Potential topics include, but are not limited to, the following:
- catalytic pyrolysis of biomass of residual biomass;
- bio-oil upgrading to biofuels through catalytic hydrodeoxygenation;
- bimetallic and zeolite catalysts for bio-oil upgrading;
- hydrothermal liquefaction of wet biomass;
- hydrothermal carbonization of biomass;
- computational/theoretical chemistry of biomass conversion and upgrading;
- density functional theory (DFT) studies on bio-oil upgrading;
- CFD studies of biofuels for optimization of design and operating conditions.
Prof. Dr. Nanda Kishore
Guest Editor
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Keywords
- renewable energy
- green chemicals
- sustainable goals
- pyrolysis
- liquefaction
- gasification
- combustion
- value added chemicals
- biomass
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