Sustainable Synthesis Products

Fraunhofer ISE has been developing sustainable synthesis products for over 20 years. In the Department of Sustainable Synthesis Products our aim to increase the energy efficiency of thermochemical processes while simultaneously reducing the carbon dioxide and exhaust gas emissions to achieve nearly zero emission combustion.

With our innovative solutions in process technology, we contribute to the successful achievement of the global energy transition:

• CatVap® is our unique fuel processing technology which is easily scalable for both diesel and gasoline engines. The system provides highly efficient thermal energy from fuel (diesel, gasoline, synthetic fuels), coupled into the exhaust system and thus provides the thermal energy required for exhaust gas conversion.
• We work on the more efficient, cost-optimized and sustainable production of fuels, chemicals and energy carriers such as ammonia, methanol, dimethyl ether (DME), oxymethylene ether (OME) and jet fuels based on H₂/CO₂/CO or H₂/N₂ feeds according to the needs of our customers in the process and chemical industry (Power to Liquids, PtL)
• We design, test and characterize tailor-made catalysts as part of our service offer. Our research and development focuses on the synthesis and optimization of sustainable carbon and nitrogen-doped carbon (NDC) based catalysts for hydrogenation and dehydrogenation reactions. Our sophisticated high temperature near-ambient pressure X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (HT-NAP-XPS) equipment enables us to investigate the chemical states of atoms and their interactions at the surface. This information is key for understanding the catalytic activity.

Economic and Sustainability Assessment:

Through own experimental investigations, expert interviews, literature research and in-house validated simulation models, we can provide our clients with a thorough assessment on the technological feasibility of innovative and energy-efficient processes. These are complemented by economic feasibility studies and life cycle assessments (LCA).

Design and Operation of Test Stands:

We precisely analyze the performance of commercially available and in-house developed catalysts at our own miniplant, which we can customize according to our clients’ wishes. We both design and operate test stands, if need be automated, in order to analyze the solid, liquid and gaseous products using state-of-the-art analytics.

Simulation tools:

In order to optimize the thermochemical processes, we use the following simulation programs for steady state and dynamic process simulation along the entire value chain up to and including sub-processes in specialized unit operations:

• Aspen®
• CHEMCAD®
• Matlab/Simulink®

We also use Ansys® for computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations and Umberto® for life cycle assessments (LCA) and life cycle costing (LCC).