IMDEA Energy, awarded with the Energy Globe World Award 2021 for its participation in the SUN-to-LIQUID project
Institute IMDEA Energy, together with Bauhaus Luftfahrt e. V. and ETH Zurich, has been awarded the Energy Globe World Award 2021 for its participation in the SUNlight-to-LIQUID project: Integrated solarthermochemical synthesis of liquid hydrocarbon fuels.
The award was announced on 8 November at the gala ceremony held during the United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP 26. Alongside SUNlight-to-LIQUID, the German company Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy and Wave Swell Energy, representing Australia, were also recognised in the ‘fire’ category.
Awarded also in the national category
The institute has also received the ‘National Energy Globe Award Spain 2021’ in the national category, in recognition of the most outstanding environmental project in Spain. This award was presented on 3 November at IMDEA Energía’s headquarters in a ceremony attended by Ernst Kopp, Commercial Counsellor and Virginia Alonso, Business & Communications Development Manager at the Commercial Office of the Austrian Embassy in Madrid, together with David Serrano, Director of IMDEA Energía, Manuel Romero, Deputy Director of IMDEA Energía and José González Aguilar, Head of the High Temperature Processes Unit at IMDEA Energía.
SUN-to-LIQUID has addressed the challenge of producing renewable fuels from water and CO2 using concentrated solar energy and demonstrating the synthesis of solar paraffin. This process has important implications for the transport sector, especially for long-haul aviation and the marine sector, as they are dependent on the refuelling of liquid fuels.
The project has successfully scaled up the technology for the first real solar radiation tests. To realise this demonstration, a concentrating solar power plant has been built at Institute IMDEA Energía in Móstoles, Spain, entirely developed by its High Temperature Processes Research Unit.
“As a result, we have a field of heliostats, mirrors that track the position of the sun at all times, which manages to concentrate 2,500 times the solar radiation – three times more than the concentration used in commercial solar towers commonly used to produce electricity – which has opened the door for this technology to be applied in the production of solar fuels and hydrogen,” explains Manuel Romero, Deputy Director of IMDEA Energía.
The project ran from January 2016 to 31 December 2019 and received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI).
Alongside IMDEA Energy, the SUN-to-LIQUID consortium includes other research centres and companies involved in the thermochemical production of solar fuels, such as Bauhaus Luftfahrt e.V., ETH Zurich, DLR, Abengoa, ARTTIC and HyGear.
The world’s most recognised environmental award
The Energy Globe World Sustainability Award, organised by the independent Austrian Energy Globe Foundation, is today the world’s most recognised environmental award. With 182 participating countries and more than 25,000 projects submitted from all over the world, the awards recognise the most outstanding work in each country, ranging from small and simple initiatives to large-scale projects.
According to Ernst Kopp, Commercial Counsellor at the Commercial Office of the Austrian Embassy in Madrid, “Advantage Austria is a strong supporter of the Energy Globe Awards and its aim to strengthen society’s awareness of the need for green change by rewarding projects that stand out for their environmental and renewable best practices. In this sense, it gives me great pleasure to present IMDEA Energy with the world-renowned Energy Globe Award for its excellent work in the field of environmental sustainability on the occasion of the SUN-to-LIQUID project. Thank you for this magnificent initiative and for wanting to make a better world where renewable energies and sustainability play a key role. Congratulations on this exemplary project.
David Serrano, Director of IMDEA Energy and Professor at the URJC receives a prestigious ERC Advanced Grant
The call for ‘Advanced Grants 2020’ of the European Research Council (ERC) funds with 507 million euros a total of 209 scientific projects to be developed in Europe, of which eleven will be carried out in Spain. Landing in our country a total of 26.5 million euros with a view to supporting ‘pioneering, high-risk and high-potential’ programmes to be carried out over the next five years.
One of them, the project of the director of Institute IMDEA Energy and professor at the URJC, David Serrano, has received one of the prestigious ERC Advanced Grant. A grant of €2.4M to realise the TODENZE project, an ambitious research programme aimed at the development of dendritic zeolites (Opening the pathway towards dentritic zeolites), which has aroused the ERC’s particular interest. This grant recognises the disruptive nature of the research project and the excellent scientific trajectory and leadership capacity of David Serrano, being one of those selected from among 2,678 proposals, being part of the 8% of the applications that have been funded.
David Serrano, professor of Chemical Engineering at the URJC, has focused on materials with nano-dendritic structures that have aroused special interest in the scientific community over the last decade due to their extraordinary properties, as well as on zeolites, microporous crystalline materials of great relevance and with important industrial applications in a wide range of fields (oil refining, petrochemistry, fine chemistry, treatment of contaminated effluents, etc.). And although conventional zeolites have important restrictions due to their small pore size that limit the accessibility of bulky species, the possibility of achieving their synthesis with dendritic superstructures would greatly expand their potential applications with multiple uses.
In this context, TODENZE is an ambitious project given its enormous potential in terms of scientific, technological and industrial impact, serving as a basis for the design of new materials with multifunctional properties. It addresses objectives that would provide significant benefits in strategic areas such as the environment, sustainable energy, the circular economy and medicine. In particular, the dendritic zeolites to be developed in this project will be explored in two applications of great interest and very different fields: formulation of catalysts in complex reaction systems for obtaining advanced biofuels and as nanocarriers for the combination of gene and drug therapies. Professor Serrano’s project is positioned as a hope and, above all, as part of the forefront of European research.
Identification of the active sites in a catalytic porous material by applying computational chemistry
Covalent Organic Frameworks (COFs) are an emerging class of porous materials with fascinating applications in sensing, energy storage and catalysis. In the current work*, the active site of a palladium-loaded COF catalyst active in Suzuki-Miyaura couplings is unveiled by applying advanced X-ray characterization techniques, such as Pair Distribution Function (PDF) analysis and X-ray Absorption Spectroscopy (XAS) in combination with computational chemistry methods based on Density Functional Theory (DFT). The Suzuki reaction, a cross-coupling transformation, is widely used in organic synthesis because of the low toxicity and the mild conditions.
In this work, a porous imine-linked COF is used as a platform to deposit catalytically active palladium species. Interestingly, the pristine COF material possesses local defects resulting from the reversible hydrolysis of the imine linkages, which are able to selectively bind catalytic palladium. One fundamental question is the identification of the structure of the palladium active sites, because of the existence of multiple binding sites where the palladium could be attached. Once the active site is unveiled, it can help us understand the catalytic mechanism and thus give new directions about how to improve the performance of the material. As a first step, DFT calculations were performed in order to characterize the defects and find the energetically most stable conformations after the hydrolysis. The DFT results show that the trans-defects, in which the amine and the aldehyde are pointing out towards different directions, are energetically more stable than the cis-defects (where amine and aldehydes are pointing towards the same direction). Subsequently, the energetics of the metalation reaction on both defect-free and defective COF materials was calculated. For the defect-free, only one binding site exists, which is the coordination to two imine groups. For the defective COF, multiple coordination sites exist, with the most stable conformation being the coordination of palladium to an imine and amine group simultaneously. The DFT results are in excellent agreement with advanced X-ray characterization techniques, such as the PDF analysis and the Extended X-ray Absorption Fine Structure (EXAFS) spectroscopy. An interesting conclusion of our work is that for increasing concentration of defects in the COF material, the defect sites (imine-amine) would play a key role in the catalytic cycle, because they are the preferred sites for the metalation with palladium.
(*) Unveiling the Local Structure of Palladium Loaded Into Imine-Linked Layered Covalent Organic Frameworks for Cross-Coupling Catalysis. Ignacio Romero-Muñiz, Andreas Mavrandonakis, Pablo Albacete, Alicia Vega, Valérie Briois, Félix Zamora, Ana E. Platero-Prats. Angewandte Chemie International Edition 2020, Volume 59, Issue 31, Pages 13013-13020. DOI: 10.1002/anie.202004197, http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/anie.202004197
More information: Andreas Mavrandonakis, Senior Assistant researcher, Electrochemical Processes Unit, andreas.mavrantonakis@imdea.org
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