Cluster of Excellence "Tailor-Made Fuels from Biomass" (TMFB)

World-wide increasing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, a rising energy demand and limited availability of fossil energy resources constitute major challenges facing society today. Special emphasis is on transportation fuels, due to their specific requirements with respect to distribution, storage, preparation and combustion. Renewable raw materials are attaining increasing interest in this context. The Cluster of Excellence (CoE) “Tailor-Made Fuels from Biomass” (TMFB) takes an interdisciplinary research approach towards new synthetic fuels based on biomass feedstock. New target-designed synthesis pathways, employing novel catalytic systems and reaction solvents and tightly integrated production processes, which embed intensified process units for fuel production, are considered to create new tailor-made fuels most efficiently. The potential of the fuel as optimisation parameter for future low-temperature combustion technology for internal combustion engines will be fundamentally explored. By striving for a new catalytic, selective and targeted transformation of the whole plant (lignocellulose) into fuel components, tailored to the requirements of novel clean combustion processes, this CoE will provide the scientific basis to introduce the 3rd generation of biofuels. The integrated approach, clustering expertise from natural and engineering sciences, will follow a model-based design procedure: a mixture of a few well-defined candidate fuel components with tailored properties will be derived from the requirements of the combustion process. The viability of the desired blend of fuel components is therefore decided by technological, economic and ecological constraints, which critically depend on (bio-) chemical transformation, process engineering and combustion technology.

Ongoing success within the TMFB Cluster from the field of resource pulping can be found in a recently published article of Nature Chemistry

Current research focus in the thematic area: Cluster of Excellence "Tailor-Made Fuels from Biomass" (TMFB)

	Process- and Product Design
	Membrane technology
	Environmental engineering, water and energy technologies
	Extraction
	Dispersions and interfaces
	Molecular Thermodynamics and Simulation
	Tailor-Made Fuels from Biomass (TMFB)
	Shaken bioreactors
	Fermentation technology
	Biocatalysis