(7jp) Techno-Economic and Life Cycle Analysis of the Renewable Energy Conversion Pathways

Sustainable energy has a promising future to replace petroleum to power the world as well as providing a cleaner environment. Transdisciplinary knowledges and perspectives combining engineering, statistics, economics and environments are crucial to push the new renewable energy technologies to the real world. My research experiences focused on evaluating new energy production technologies using a combination method of process modeling simulation, statistics regressions, techno-economic analysis and life cycle analysis. I designed and modeled several novel chemical processes to produce carbon-negative energy and chemicals, involving both biological and thermochemical conversion processes, such as fast pyrolysis & hydroprocessing, solvent liquefaction, fermentation, anaerobic digestion etc. Based on the chemical process models built in Aspen Plus, I further conducted economic models to evaluate the estimated total investments, payback period, break-even cost etc., to comprehensively evaluate the economic feasibility of the new energy production process. Besides the economic analysis, I also assessed how the technology might interact with air, water, and human health, quantifying the environmental benefits of different sustainable energy production technologies through life cycle analysis. I also applied statistics methodology to building regression models, further investigating correlations among process related inputs and economic/environmental related outputs, as well, evaluating the sensitivity and uncertainty of various parameters.

Modeling the world to better understand and improve the real world is the fundamental concept of my research. My future interests will be combining the global economic markets with the potential sustainable energy process, to conduct deeper analysis of the mutual correlation between the real economic markets and the engineering technology. As well, I would like to build models to evaluate the global GHG emissions reduction potentials, helping accelerate the adoption of different renewable energy technologies.

Publications

• Wenqin Li, Dang, Q., Smith, R., Brown, R. C. & Wright, M. M. Techno-economic analysis

of the stabilization of bio-oil fractions for insertion into petroleum refineries. ACS Sustain.

Chem. Eng. (2017). (Special Issue Paper)

• Wenqin Li, Qi Dang, Robert C. Brown, David Laird, M. M. W. The impacts of biomass

properties on the pyrolysis yields, economic and environmental performance of the pyrolysis-

bioenergy-biochar platform to carbon negative energy. Bioresource Technology. (2017).

(Front Cover Paper)

• Wenqin Li, Denis Bbosa, Arpa Ghosh, Robert C. Brown, M. M. W. Techno-economic analysis of

ethanol production from solvent liquefaction of lignocellulosic biomass. (Submitted)

Teaching Interests:

I have co-instructed a mechanical engineering design class (Introduction to Mechanical Engineering Design) in fall 2013. I got a valuable chance to closely work with engineering undergraduates, helping them developing their brilliant ideas into real mechanical products, with a goal of improving people’s lives in developing countries of Africa. I also participated in organizing an Expo for all 150 students at the end, connecting the students with industrial leaders, professors, graduate students and their undergraduate peers. I was very proud that one team from my class got the first prize in the Expo competition. My philosophy of teaching is using different projects and activities to help students better understand basic theoretical concepts/principles. As well, connecting the theoretical world with practical applications or experiences will motive students’ interests as well as helping them accumulate real problem-solving skills.