LAURELIN partners at mid-term consortium meeting display promising results
AIMPLAS is coordinating the LAURELIN project aiming at optimizing green methanol production to reduce transport carbon emissions. On 25-26 April, LAURELIN partners were hosted by the University of Manchester (UK) for their 24th month project meeting. The occasion for the presentation of each partners’ achieved results in the last 6 months, and a mid-term overall reflexion on the project’s progress.
LAURELIN’s team is developing new catalyst systems perfectly adapted to advanced reactor technologies to reduce energy consumption of the methanol synthesis from CO2, and therefore its cost. The team is working on three promising technologies: microwave, non-thermal plasma induction and magnetic induction. Three of the planned reactors for CO2 conversion to methanol are now fully operative, and the first results obtained with the developed catalysts very promising. Promising conversion levels are being reached and they will be further improved in the next months.
In some of the catalysts/reactors combinations, LAURELIN partners are already improving the current literature results. This is the case for the non-thermal plasma and conventional thermal reactors with a new generation of catalysts. In another way some new reactors have been improved their capabilities increasing the pressure limits, which are suitable for high methanol yield ratios:
- The microwave reactor, with results reaching 2,45 Ghz and up to 60 bars of pressure;
- The magnetic induction reactor that has achieved a working pressure of 10 bars
In obtaining these results, LAURELIN’s partners have gathered much knowledge about the conversion mechanism of CO2 into Methanol through innovations combining the DRIFT technology and EXAF analysis.
The project has also stimulated an impressive number of peer-to-peer activities among the consortium members, fostering collaborations beyond LAURELIN-related topics. A worth-noticing success in LAURELIN’s project is the very successful collaboration with the Japanese consortium partners (the University of Tokyo and the Tokyo Institute of Technology). Since the beginning of the project, the European and Japanese researchers are very effectively collaborating on catalysts and exchanging scientific results.
The next consortium meeting will be taking place on 20-22 November in Tokyo (Japan). It will include a clustering session with LAURELIN’s sister research projects ORACLE and 4AirCraft, in the presence of the Japanese partner institutions.
Involving universities, research organisations and SMEs from Belgium, Germany, Japan, Netherlands, Spain and the United Kingdom, LAURELIN is a 48-month project funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme and the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST).
