New Leader for Bio4Energy's Environmental Researchers

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Created: Friday, 30 June 2017 13:04

Written by Anna Strom

Associate professor Stina Jansson is a new leader for the R&D platform Bio4Energy Environment and Nutrient Recycling. Photo by Bio4Energy.The research and development platform Bio4Energy Environment and Nutrient Recycling has a new leader. This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., associate professor at Umeå University (UmU), will be taking over the platform leadership from Dan Boström, who has seen his workload increase substantially since becoming Bio4Energy programme manager in February last year. Boström and Jansson will be sharing the leadership over the summer, following which Jansson will shoulder the role fully from 1 September 2017.

“We are pleased to announce that Stina is a new platform leader in Bio4Energy. She is a young researcher with a great record as an environmental chemist. She is also at a very progressive stage of her career. We are glad that she has accepted to take on the role”, said Boström, professor at UmU, adding that the Bio4Energy Board had passed the decision this month to promote Jansson to the post of platform leader.

Part of the research environment since its launch in 2010, Jansson was a postgraduate student in the group of the former Bio4Energy programme manager, professor emeritus Stellan Marklund. Her area of expertise includes research to check the environmental credentials of thermal processes for the conversion of biomass.

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Bio4Energy Researchers Acknowledged for 'Milestone' Article on Ash Transformation Chemistry

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Created: Tuesday, 20 June 2017 19:04

Written by Anna Strom

For a long time, the selection of fuels for biomass combustion, in terms of avoiding problems such as slagging and fouling of the reactors, often was carried out based on trial and error. About a decade into the 21^st century, a group of Sweden-based researchers with long-standing experience in high-temperature conversion of woody feedstock to heat and power started to mull over a more systematic approach to assessing the reactions in thermal conversion of the chief trouble-making content of the biomass: the inorganic compounds forming the ash.

In 2012, the scientist, brought together under the umbrella of Bio4Energy, published an article on Ash Transformation Chemistry during Combustion of Biomass in the interdisciplinary scientific journal Energy & Fuels by the American Chemical Society (ASC). The article describes a conceptual model by which any type of biomass—whether originating from wood, woody or agricultural residue or other types of combustible waste—may be characterised, and thus understood, in terms of the basic chemical reactions that take place during thermal conversion of biomass into heat, power, fuels and chemicals.

After having been amply cited by other researchers around the world, this spring, the article by Bio4Energy scientists received the 2017 Energy & Fuels Joint Award for Excellence in Publication.

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Prebiotics to be Developed in Science-industry Project

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Created: Friday, 16 June 2017 15:42

Written by Anna Strom

Bio4Energy researchers with expertise in biochemical conversion technologies and wood pre-processing are at the helm of two new projects to develop prebiotics and commercial fish feed, and fungi and biofuels, respectively, from bio-based starting materials. Both are three-year projects granted in the 2017 round of funding for innovation projects by BioInnovation, a Swedish national platform for bio-based innovations, and have a substantial line-up of commercial companies as partners.

The first project, called ForceUpValue for short, aims at demonstrating the production of low-cost prebiotics—food or feed ingredients that, once in the gut, induce the growth of microorganisms and which activity can have a positive effects on human health—starting from two abundantly available sources of bio-based feedstock: Forestry residues and a sea-living organism called Ciona intestinalis. The latter is known to have an outer layer, a tunic, rich in cellulose, which the project partners expect to use in the production of prebiotics.

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Bio4Energy Accelerated Integration, Future Past 2020

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Created: Tuesday, 13 June 2017 11:38

Written by Anna Strom

Accelerated Integration and Future Past 2020 was the theme for a recent Spring 2017 Bio4Energy Researchers' Meeting or Bio4Energy biannual conference for its researchers. The presenters were all recruited for their willingness to collaborate more widely across the Bio4Energy Research and Development Platforms.

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Attachments:

Active Carbon Catalysts of Bio-based Waste	[Lakhya Konwar, Bio4Energy Chemical Catalysis and Separation Technologies]	1875 kB
CFD Modelling of Biomass Fast Pyrolysis Oil Spray Combustion	[Pál Tóth, Bio4Energy Thermochemical Conversion Technologies, 8 June 2017]	1899 kB
Dissecting the Genetics of Wood Formation in Norway Spruce	[Rosario García-Gil, Bio4Energy Feedstock, 8 June 2017]	2040 kB
How Should We Use Our Forests? Timber, Bioenergy or Both?	[Runar Brännlund, Bio4Energy System Analysis and Bioeconomy, 9 June 2017]	315 kB
Integrating Resource Recovery with Energy Systems	[Nils Skoglund, Bio4Energy Thermochemical Conversion Technologies, 8 June 2017]	782 kB
Mixed Fuel Composed of Household Waste and Waste Wood	[Mar Edo, Bio4Energy Environment and Nutrient Recycling, 8 June 2017]	1628 kB
Online Monitoring of Organic and Inorganic Content in Whole Bulk Streams	[Mikael Thyrel, Bio4Energy Wood Pre-processing, 8 June 2017]	2168 kB
Organosolv Biorefinery of the Lignocellulosic Biomass	[Paul Christakopoulos, Bio4Energy Biopolymers and Biochemical Conversion Technologies, 8 June 2017]	8318 kB
The Need to Assess Environmental Performance of Emerging Innovations	[Krishna Upadhyayula, Bio4Energy System Analysis and Bioeconomy, 9 June 2017]	722 kB

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Swedish Centre for Biomass Gasification Gets Four More Years

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Created: Wednesday, 12 April 2017 14:02

Written by Anna Strom

Joakim Lundgren gives a talk at a 2016 seminar by the Swedish Centre for Biomass Gasification. Photo by Alan Sherrard, Bioenergy International.

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International Day of Forests 2017

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Created: Tuesday, 21 March 2017 01:00

Written by UN FAO

Bio4Energy Graduate to Bioethanol Developer SEKAB

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Created: Friday, 10 March 2017 13:25

Written by Anna Strom

Monica Normark, pictured at her thesis defence with Wilfred Vermerris, has taken up a position at Bio4Energy industrial partner SEKAB. Photo by Bio4Energy.

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New Project to Turn Quinoa Residue into Bio-based Products

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Created: Tuesday, 28 February 2017 16:56

Written by Anna Strom

Quinoa farming on the Andean Altiplano. Photo by courtesy of Truth About Human Food.

Scientists in Sweden and Bolivia have teamed up to investigate whether residues from the Latin American country’s production of quinoa—the health food that helped a good number of poor Andean farmers to a higher standard of living in the early-to-mid 2000s, but with overproduction and falling prices in its wake—can be turned into biorefinery products such as renewable ethanol, bio-based polymers or so-called biopesticides.

The three-year project, led from Sweden by This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. of Bio4Energy, started last month as news arrived that the prestigious Swedish Research Council had decided to fund researcher exchanges and laboratory expenses under its 2016 call for Development Research. Umeå University in Sweden and Bolivian Universidad Mayor de San Andrés are project partners.

In essence, the Swedish and Bolivian researchers will pool their expertise in biochemical conversion of recalcitrant lignocellulosic materials, on the one hand, and in microbial biodiversity and agricultural conditions of the high Altiplano of the Andes, the high planes of the mountain range that straddles Bolivia and Peru, on the other. The scientists will start where food production stops, that is once the edible quinoa seeds have been separated from the rest of the quinoa plant and what is left are the stalk and seed coats.

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