Concerns over global climate change have created the need for new fuels and bioproducts to substitute for fossil carbon-based materials. To improve the biofuel production, the pre-treatment of biomass is high desirable. Pre-treatment is a process in which the carbohydrates, particularly cellulose, get ready for conversion in biofuels through an enzymatic or microbial attack.

Recent experiments conducted in the TIMR laboratory have shown that oxidative chemical pre-treatments in the presence or not of ligninolytic fungi, in a non-sterile environment, significantly improve the biogas yield of lignocellulosic biomass. To optimize this pre-treatment and thus to be able to deploy it at the industrial level, the objective of this project is to acquire complementary knowledge on its impacts at different spatial scales by combining several complementary techniques (solid state NMR, DRIFT, FTIR, Raman, physisorption, XPS, Electron Microscopy) in order to correlate the parameters of the pre-treatment and their impact on anaerobic digestion with relevant markers at the molecular and/or surface scale. The objective is ultimately to optimize the production of biomethane.

Vincenzo Calcagno obtained his Master’s degree in chemical science, Naples (Italy) and his PhD in Materials Engineering, specialization in Biomaterials, Naples (Italy)

Encadrants :
Xiaojun LIU (Assistant Professor, TIMR, UTC)
Claude JOLIVALT (Professor, LRS, SU)

Laboratoires impliqués dans le post doc :
Roberval - unité de recherche en Mécanique, énergie et électricité
LRS - Laboratoire de Réactivité de Surface