Research
Research in the Goldfarb Lab sits at the nexus of energy and the environment and spans millennia!
We have three overarching goals:
(1) identify both short and long-term solutions to the world’s energy needs;
(2) understand and mitigate our human impact on the environment;
(3) translate new methods in biofuels and environmental analyses to the exploration of ancient materials to understand and preserve our global history.
We have a variety of on-going projects led by undergraduate, graduate and post-doctoral researchers in the laboratory as well as in the classroom and community!
Here are just a few of the projects we’re working on these days.
Manipulating Equilibria to Enhance Biofuels
Tuning Liquid Biofuels from Hydrothermal Liquefaction via Exploiting Fundamental Thermodynamics
Hydrothermal liquefaction (HTL) transforms organic wastes into liquid biofuels by processing the waste in water at high temperature and pressure. One of the advantages of HTL over other biomass conversion techniques is that it directly treats wet wastes without an energy-intensive pre-drying step. To date, the majority of HTL research has explored the impact of process conditions on products generated from a range of biomass feedstocks. However, this research approach cannot overcome the primary challenges to widespread application of HTL for biofuels, namely that (1) we cannot accurately control or predict product distributions, resulting in the need for significant downstream upgrading of the biocrude, and (2) the byproduct process water requires considerable treatment; these two challenges combine to make current large-scale HTL economically infeasible. Our new approach to process design, recently funded by a National Science Foundation CAREER award, could enable widespread implementation of HTL for wet waste to biofuel conversion.
Combustion Behaviors of Hydrochars from Wet Biomass Wastes
Converting Wet Biomass Wastes to Solid Fuels via Hydrothermal Carbonization
Hydrothermal carbonization (HTC) is an economical method to convert wet biomass waste streams, including food, dairy, brewery, sludge, and digester wastes, to hydrochar, a carbon-based solid often called bio-coal for its “coal-like” properties. Despite the growing popularity of HTC as a waste conversion scheme – companies across the world are using HTC reactors to treat wet biomasses– we know little about the fundamental combustion properties of this renewable bio-coal. This limits the potential to use hydrochars for clean energy generation. In a National Science Foundation funded project in collaboration with Prof. Jacqueline O’Connor (Penn State Mechanical Engineering), our research teams will collaborate to uncover (1) how hydrochars form and (2) how hydrochars combust. This knowledge is critical to understanding which waste feedstocks and processing conditions optimize hydrochar fuel properties, and what combustor operating conditions maximize energy recovery. The ability to use renewable solid fuels for energy generation can help mitigate climate change and transform the U.S. into a green energy exporter and job opportunity creator.
Re-engineering the Integrated Biorefinery
Biomass as a Fuel Source and Nanotemplate
This project marries two seemingly disparate fields – production of renewable fuels from biomass and fabrication of novel metal oxide nanoparticles – in a simultaneous process. By impregnating biomass with inorganic compounds, followed by heat treatment, we recover syngas, bio-oil, and bio-templated nanoparticles with unique structures and properties. The inorganic compounds act as a catalyst to improve the stability of the bio-oil. The biomass serves as a removable template for nanoparticle growth, creating structures with higher surface areas and properties mimicking nature. This co-production of energy and materials opens new possibilities in the biorefinery concept, not only to capture energy from renewables such as biomass, but also to produce nanomaterials for a range of applications in a more sustainable way. We are working with Prof. Emily Ryan’s group at Boston University use Materials Informatics to uncover appropriate catalysts, and Prof. Roberto Volpe’s group at Queen Mary University to understand in situ changes to biomass structure. This project is supported by the National Science Foundation under grant No. 1933071.
Engineering Hydrochars and Biochars for Enhanced Water Quality
Converting agro-industrial wastes to biofuels, slow-release fertilizers and activated carbons
In Central and Upstate New York, concerns over run-off from dairy and agricultural activities such as grape cultivation, cabbage, corn and hay farming could be assuaged by a new integrated biorefinery. This work, funded by a USDA-NIFA Hatch grant, will design a flexible thermochemical conversion pathway that converts seasonally available biomasses to biofuels and bioproducts. The process design focuses on biomasses specific to NY industries. It will produce soil amendments that act as slow-release fertilizers to mitigate excess nutrient run-off, as well as activated carbon adsorbents to sequester water contaminants, preventing future Hazardous Algal Blooms and protecting drinking water supplies. By converting local farm and food production waste to biofuels, slow release fertilizers and activated carbon adsorbents we can: 1) lower resource consumption; 2) enhance nutrient use efficiency; 3) increase crop yields; 4) improve renewable energy deployment; 5) lessen anthropogenic environmental impacts of industrial agriculture and 6) protect and enhance drinking and recreational water quality across the state. This complements prior work by co-PI Lehmann on pyrolysis of only manure to produce slow-release fertilizers. The proposed work advances the field by looking at impacts of combined feedstocks and processing conditions to produce optimized fuels and materials in an integrated process. Recent publications from this work include an article in Biomass and Bioenergy and Bioresource Technology and ACS Sustainable Chemistry and Engineering.
Efficient Designs for Efficient Materials
Systemic Design of Porous Heterogeneous Hierarchical Materials to Optimize Reactive Transport
Porous heterogeneous hierarchical engineered materials have a ubiquitous presence across applications as varied as antibacterial agents for biomedical applications, catalysts for fuel upgrading, sorbents for CO2, photocatalysts for H2O treatment, and electrodes for Li-ion batteries. These materials comprise an organic and/or inorganic scaffold designed with multiple levels and distributions of porosities, tortuosities and particle sizes, which are decorated with active sites (often nanoscale inorganic compounds) that can be incorporated during or after “construction” of the scaffold. Despite the myriad of discrete applications, a new integrated computational-experimental approach to the design of these materials that combines materials design with structural design, would force a paradigm shift across these disparate fields. In a new approach to the design of materials, we will work with Prof. Emily Ryan’s group and Prof. Pirooz Vakili’s group to develop a systematic process to design, test, and validate porous heterogeneous hierarchical materials for renewable fuel upgrading. This project is supported by the National Science Foundation.
Reconstructing History by Applying Lessons from Biofuels
Developing new Approaches to Organic Residue Analysis
Many of the biomass to biofuel conversion processes we do in a few hours in the laboratory have been on-going for thousands of years. Our team is developing new methods to extract organic residues, like olive oil, from ancient ceramics to enhance recovery efficiency and improve residue identification. By combining a systems engineering approach to develop artificial neural network models, chemical engineering to enhance extraction recovery and compound identification, and archaeology to guide interpretation, our team is breaking new ground in this truly convergent research space. Our hypothesis is that we too often attribute residues to olive oil because of a lack of better information. By developing both better extraction methods and a way to back-predict which residues represent which ingredients under specific environmental conditions, we can provide more accurate assessments of what a storage vessel was used for and, in turn, inform our economic, social and political understandings of sites across the ancient world.
The Classroom as a Living Laboratory
Bringing Challenging Engineering Concepts to Life
Prof. Goldfarb’s classroom is also a place of innovative research. She develops new hands-on activities to teach students fundamental engineering concepts. Her most recent – a study on how heat and mass transfer limitations cause dendrite growth – decorated the cover of the Journal of Chemical Education. She has taught 16 different courses in her career. Her favorites (so far!) are “Sustainable Engineering Thermodynamics”, where she uses tools like Life Cycle Analyses to help students understand difficult concepts like Entropy and Exergy, and “Public Facing Science: Design, Analysis, and Communication,” an interdisciplinary, service-learning course that empowered students to formulate and empirically test hypotheses in both laboratory and social settings to address a pressing problem facing the local Ithacan community: persistent lead contamination from the Ithaca Gun Company, despite past Superfund clean-ups. In Fall 2024, she’ll join the CBE Unit Operations teaching team to guide students through the Heat Exchanger and Continuous Distillation experiments.