CREST Bioenergy - Collaborations

Key partnerships with other universities/colleges include SUNY-Stony Brook (funded by CREST supplement) and Louisiana Tech. Key partnerships with national laboratories include Argonne National Lab (equipment access), Oak Ridge National Lab (equipment access), and National Renewable Energy Lab. Collaborations with industry include RTI (co-hosting the 2016 TCS conference, student and faculty internship opportunities) and Southern Research (student internships).

Collaboration with XSEDE

The main research area in Thrust Area I of the NSF CREST Bioenergy Center at NC A&T State University (http://www.ncat.edu/research/bioenergy/index.html) is “High-Quality Synthesis Gas production via Biomass Gasification”.

Development of a Biomass Gasification Unit with its unique geometry and technical characteristics requires careful design and analysis of its operational conditions. Modern research tools such as MFIX open source code allow numerical simulation of multiphase reactive flows with applications to a fluidized bed gasifier.

Flow predictions based on MFIX code demands High Performance Computing resources. Collaboration of CREST Bioenergy Center with XSEDE (https://www.xsede.org/) – “Biomass Gasification in Fluidized Bed Gasifier” provides needed HPC resources, supports and facilitates computer based simulation research in this NSF-CREST Bioenergy Center.

Anton Pylypenko – A postdoctoral scholar of N.C. A&T NSF-CREST Bioenergy Center received an award of XSEDE HPC resources on SDSC Appro with Intel Sandy Bridge Cluster with 1,300,000.0 SUs. The value of these awarded resources is $110,000.00.

Industrial Collaborations

Establishment of partnership with Research Triangle Institute (RTI), Dr. David Dayton, director of advanced Biofuels at RTI has been serving on our advisory board. He has also served as a member in students’ graduate dissertation committees. He has also provided summer internship opportunity to one of our graduate students last summer.

Establishment of partnership with Placers/Gore & Associates in Elkton, A PH.D. student conducted fluid dynamic modeling and simulation research during an internship last summer under the supervision of Dr. Zhenyu He. The student is now working as a full-time employee in the company.

Establishment with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Dr. Marcus Worsley is staff scientist, High Performance Materials and serves as a member of our external advisory Board for the CREST Center for Bioenergy.

A graduate student Nafeezuddin Mohammad conducted a summer internship at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 2020 under the supervision of Dr. Marcus Worsley. The work involved fabrication and demonstration of the first joint thermo-electrochemical instrument for production of higher hydrocarbons -synthetic fuels- from CO2 in the microreactor.

Industrial Collaborators of the ROI Project

Maverick Synfuels who develops and commercializes advanced thermo-chemical technologies that convert low-value and renewable feedstocks into high-value fuels and is based in NC is the industrial partner of ROI project entitled “Solar enabled green liquid fuels from biogas”. This is a joint project between Dr. Kuila, Dr. Wang and Dr. Aravamudhan from NCA&TSU and Dr. Li and Dr. Abolhasani from NCSU, which is funded by UNC-GA, 2017-2020.

Carbon Cycle Energy (c2e) of Boulder Colorado has broken ground on what the company says is the largest utility-scale biogas facility in the United States. When fully operational the facility, to be built near Warsaw, North Carolina, will transform animal and food waste into enough energy to power 32,000 homes. C2E is also an industrial collaborator of the above ROI project.