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PURDUE UNIVERSITY

Purdue University, in partnership with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the University of Tennessee, and the Argonne National Laboratory, offers comprehensive expertise for a world-leading Energy Frontier Research Center (EFRC) that will make transformational discoveries in bioenergy science. The Center for Direct Catalytic Conversion of Biomass to Biofuels (C3Bio) vision is to develop technologies that maximize the energy and carbon efficiencies of biofuel production by the rational and synergistic design of both physical and chemical conversion processes and the biomass itself. We have three research goals: 1. Apply new catalytic transformations to biomimetic structures and lignocellulosic biomass variants, and identify highly efficient process pathways. 2. Achieve an atomic-to-macromolecular scale understanding of the interactions of catalysts with the chemical and physical structures of lignocellulosic biomass. 3. Engineer tailored biomass for highly efficient, direct catalytic conversion to liquid fuels and value-added products. The long-range impact of success in our research mission will be to more than double the carbon captured into fuel from biomass over existing technologies, and expand the product range beyond ethanol to alkanes and new energy-rich aromatic liquid fuels and other value-added products that retain the current liquid fuel infrastructure. The C3Bio collaborative effort will realize the fundamental processes of making and breaking covalent and other bonds in biological materials and afford us control of material properties at the molecular scale. Our proposed research plan will reveal new ways to design lignocellulosic biomass tailored for its end-use in direct chemical catalytic pathways. To reach this energy frontier, we will integrate advances in nanotechnology, chemical engineering, materials science, molecular biology and high-resolution instrumentation to relate the molecular and nanoscale properties of biomass materials to their macroscopic behavior in catalytic bioprocessing. Our commitment to education and outreach will provide undergraduate and graduate training in bioenergy systems and advanced analytical tools to help develop a future bioenergy workforce, create platforms for public education on alternative energy at local, state, and national levels, and engage corporate partners for new technology deployment.

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