(2jc) Accelerating the Transition Towards a Sustainable Bioeconomy through an Integrated Biorefinery Development Framework

Research Interests

My research focuses on designing and simulating biorefineries – refineries that produce biorenewable products – to assess the potential economic and environmental sustainability of conceptual and emerging technologies. To automate biorefinery design and modeling, I developed BioSTEAM, an open-source software capable of simulating a chemical process across landscapes of potential technological performance, design, and market scenarios. The BioSTEAM software is part of a larger Integrated Biorefinery Development Framework (see illustration), whereby a community of process modelers, together with experts in feedstocks and processing technologies, guide the development of the biorefinery model. This framework has the advantage of greater collaboration and transparency, leading to faster development and better maintenance of rigorous models able to withstand academic scrutiny. My publications have quantified trade-offs and synergies in feedstock characteristics, fermentation technologies, separation strategies, and tax incentives that may help guide research, investment, and policy.

My first-author publications have focused on assessing the potential financial viability and environmental sustainability of processing oilcane and oil-sorghum. Derived from sugarcane and sweet sorghum, two of the most productive crops on earth, oilcane and oil-sorghum hold the potential to drastically improve vegetable oil production in agriculture to meet expected demands for oil-based biofuels and oleochemicals. Additionally, the development of multiple oil-accumulating feedstocks presents an opportunity to design more resilient and profitable biorefineries that can process multiple feedstocks throughout the year. However, the structural and compositional difference between these new feedstocks and conventional oilseeds presents a challenge for biomass pretreatment, process intensification, and downstream upgrading. I worked together with experts in sugarcane and biomass processing technologies to assess different strategies to optimize the conversion of oilcane and oil-sorghum to a range of biofuels and oleochemicals.

I am currently working on improving upon classical methodology for financial viability and risk assessment by accounting for temporal uncertainty. Having this level of temporal resolution would allow the evaluation of operational flexibility strategies to adapt to market pressures and ultimately optimize design to minimize financial risk. As a future Professor, I hope to focus my research on the development and application of BioSTEAM to guide the deployment of processing technologies and reduce investment risk in novel technologies. These goals fall in line with the interests of the US Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation, both of which may become key sources of funding for my future group.

Teaching Interests

Today’s need for sustainable technologies in multidisciplinary industries such as chemicals, food, and medicine require a strong foundation in process engineering subjects, including thermodynamics, kinetics, and heat and mass transfer. As a future instructor and principal investigator on sustainable production processes, I hope to teach the next generation of engineers these core subjects in process engineering through engaging, supportive, and step-by-step instruction. My approach would lead with an introduction to potential applications, postulate the problem that needs to be solved, and qualitatively discuss the governing principles. With an intuitive understanding of the problem, I can proceed to demonstrate how the theory can be applied, solve the problem, and discuss the implications.

I have put in practice this teaching philosophy in my guest lectures and workshops. At the State University of New York, I developed and delivered a workshop on process simulation in BioSTEAM for students in Professor Kumar’s Bioprocess Engineering Simulations class. I have also had the pleasure of guest lecturing at my home university, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a class on techno-economic analysis methodology for students in Professor Zhao’s Bioenergy Technology. It is rewarding to show students how the methodology they are learning can be applied in real-world problems. The insightful questions and comments I received from talented students also made these experiences even more enjoyable.

As a future Professor, I also hope to use BioSTEAM as an educational tool for students in process design and development. While the userbase is still not as large as more established tools like Aspen, BioSTEAM is slowly being adopted by companies and research groups in the U.S. and internationally to solve industrially relevant problems. Companies such as Bluestem Biosciences in Nebraska and EV Biotech in the Netherlands have opened paid internships centered on modeling in BioSTEAM. Ultimately, I aim to broaden the opportunities of my students by connecting them with my network of academic and industrial groups seeking to evaluate emerging and conceptual chemical processes.

During my graduate studies, I have had the pleasure of serving as a mentor for one graduate and two undergraduate students at my research group. The graduate student I am currently mentoring was daunted by her project on separating biologically derived oleochemicals at first. After she completed her first task of listing the solubilities and boiling points of the oleochemicals, I discussed with her the governing principles behind both distillation and liquid-liquid extraction and explained how we can use a combination of these methods to separate and purify each product. After a few meetings, she took ownership of her project and implemented a working model. It is rewarding to see how, with guidance, she can overcome research obstacles and become confident in her skills. I hope to lead my own research group with a supportive attitude that motivates students to tackle difficult problems with patience and perseverance.