Professor Mike Timko Receives Award

Congratulations to WPI Chemical Engineering Professor Mike Timko for his award entitled “Hydrothermal Liquefaction of Food Waste and Remediation of Aqueous Byproducts” sponsored by Mainstream Engineering Corp.  Food waste is a major problem globally, with approximately 20% of all food wasted in the U.S. alone. In addition to improving the utilization of food to reduce waste in the first place, technologies are needed to convert waste food into valuable products – including energy. Unfortunately, current technologies are not cost competitive. In this work, we seek to improve the efficiency of a waste-to-energy technology that takes waste food as a feed and converts it into a product that can be used as a fuel. The successful technology will help make converting waste-to-energy economically competitive.