Michael Crowley, NREL
Faculty host: Prof Mertz
National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Golden, CO
The mission of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory is to develop the science
and technology for a sustainable society and move it into the marketplace to
replace currently unsustainable industrial approaches. One part of that effort
is the development of a bio-economy in which a carbon-neutral economy that
utilizes biomass as a source of energy and feedstocks for advanced fuels, chemicals,
and materials. Our group of computational chemists, physicists, and biologists
works with teams of experimentalists and engineers to understand the chemistry
and physics of biomass and to design economically viable approaches to conversion
to products. We use a full spectrum of methods from quantum treatments of enzymatic
and catalytic reactions to particle dynamics of wood chips and grasses in feed
hoppers. Our simulations use many physical approaches including statistical
mechanics, chemical and heat transfer, fluid mechanics, and more. I will present
some of our work on enzyme reactions, plant cell wall chemistry and physics,
multiscale modeling , and a new research direction of designing renewable polymers.