CAMPUS

WPI profs get grants to work on converting waste to fuel

Brian Lee
Brian.Lee@telegram.com

WORCESTER — Chemical engineering professors at Worcester Polytechnic Institute will use more than $2.2 million in grants to expand an effort to convert waste into environmentally-friendly biofuels, the school said Wednesday.

Associate professor,Michael Timko will team with Andrew Teixeira, assistant professor, and Geoffrey Tompsett, assistant research professor, to try to develop a process to lower reliance on fossil fuels, cut the amount of municipal waste that goes into landfills, and reduce water pollution and emissions from petroleum products and landfills, according to WPI.

A 2019 Fulbright U.S. scholar who has been developing ways to significantly improve the yield of biofuel that can be created from food waste, Timko received a three-year, $1,995,199 grant from the Department of Energy and $275,000 from the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center.

Timko, according to WPI, will expand his earlier research to mix food waste with municipal green waste, such as yard trimmings, leaves, and sticks. By combining the two kinds of waste, he’s trying to create more energy-dense oil that can be upgraded to a liquid biofuel.

“We have shown that we have methods to convert food waste into energy products,” said Timko, who earned the Fulbright award to develop a device he can use in his biofuel research. “Increasing scale is a big goal. If you can handle more waste — different kinds of waste — you can have a larger-scale process. There’s no one silver bullet to creating green energy, but this is a piece of that puzzle. Every time you can add a piece of that puzzle, it matters.”

Timko envisions that energy-producing companies will one day use his processes to turn food and yard waste from towns, grocery stores, schools, and other organizations into energy.

Collaborators on the DOE grant include researchers at MIT, University of California at Riverside, Massachusetts-based Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and Florida-based Mainstream Engineering Corp.