Techno-economic Assessment of a Flower Waste Biorefinery for Production of Terpene Esters

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    • Investigating the neural circuitry involved in the negative affective-motivational component of pain
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    • Techno-economic Assessment of a Flower Waste Biorefinery for Production of Terpene Esters
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Techno-economic Assessment of a Flower Waste Biorefinery for Production of Terpene Esters

Project Summary

Terpenes are one of the most important and versatile compounds for the flavour and fragrance industries and are currently produced commercially using petrochemical-based materials and chemical catalysis routes. Flowers are an abundant source of terpenes which can be tailored to a range of starting materials and are easy to process due to low lignin content.

This projects aims to assess the technical and economic feasibility of a flower waste biorefinery through techno-economic assessment (TEA). This 10-week project aligns with ongoing research in the department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering which is done in collaboration with Bridge Farm group (largest producers of ornamental flowers in the UK) and Unilever. The project timeline can be seen below: 

• Weeks 1-5: A conceptual production facility, based on an esterification process developed by researchers in the Chemical and Environmental Engineering department, will be modelled in Aspen Plus to account for variations in primary materials (flower extracts), enzymes and operating conditions. This will allow for detailed calculations of production rates, raw material inputs and energy requirements.
• Weeks 6-9: Reliable estimation of capital and operating costs will be performed to estimate the return on investment (ROI) of the modelled production facilities. The most promising process models in terms of productivity and energy consumption will be scaled-up to different technology readiness levels (TRL) to examine the effects of scale on the economic feasibility of this technology.
• Week 10: Report write-up to summarise the methodology, results and discussion from the modelling work. This will contribute towards a journal article and the student will be included in the author list. 

Training: This project is more suitable for Engineering students, especially chemical engineering undergraduates. The student will have the opportunity to engage with the industry collaborators and present their results at a group meeting. They will be trained on process design and modelling of biochemical technologies (e.g. esterification) as well as process economic analysis (e.g. calculation of operating costs) and profitability assessment (e.g. estimates of return on investment, minimum product selling price, etc). The candidate will be supported by existing PhD students (non-DTP) in our group working on similar projects.