Conceiving, exploring, and exploiting innovative ideas: From waste cooking oil to diesel

Conceiving, exploring, and exploiting new ideas are the basis for technological creativity and innovation. By far, the most important step is the conception of a new idea having the potential to be transformed to a successful business solution. Nevertheless, the exploration of a new idea and its subsequent exploitation require both recourses and systematic planning in order to promote a sustainable entrepreneurship. An innovative idea of a new green technology for producing diesel from residual feedstocks was conceived and developed in the Centre for Research and Technology Hellas. The main concept of this technology is the innovative exploitation of waste cooking oil, which is abundant in Greece and other Mediterranean countries. The technology is based on catalytic hydrotreatment, a traditional petroleum process that is widely employed to upgrade petroleum products. The catalytic hydrotreatment of waste cooking oil was explored with the support of the European Program LIFE+, which funded both the research and development activities as well as the demonstration of the technology. A large quantity of waste cooking oil was collected and converted to the new diesel in a sufficient quantity to fuel a garbage truck for a few months, demonstrating the new technology. The new low-carbon technology offers a new diesel of increased sustainability, superior quality, better fuel consumption, and lower emissions. Furthermore, based on conservative estimations of the available waste cooking oil quantities in Greece and due to the high conversion yields of the proposed technology, it is estimated that waste cooking oil can satisfy approximately 9.5% of the national demand in diesel fuel. Due to all the aforementioned advantages, this technology was granted the second innovation award in the 'Greece Innovates' competition organized by Eurobank EFG and Hellenic Federation of Enterprises in July 2011. Towards the exploitation of this technology, the incorporation of waste cooking oil to an existing refining process is explored with the support of the European Commission and the Greek government via the project SustainDiesel. This joint project with the Hellenic Petroleum Group exhibits strong potential for getting scaled-up to industrial scale, thus promoting a green technology into the energy sector

On the assessment of multivariable controllers using closed loop data. Part I: Identification of system models

Controller performance assessment of SISO and MIMO systems requires effective and systematic identification of the associated system models based on closed-loop data. In this work, a new methodology for the identification of the process, controller and disturbance models is presented for the purpose of enabling the evaluation of the performance of MIMO control systems. The methodology is based on subspace identification algorithms for the identification of the controller, process and disturbance models from closed-loop data. However, identification of the process model is enhanced by the estimation of the associated interactor matrix via the Variable Regression Estimation technique, the existence of which is mathematically proved. The proposed identification methodology is applied to two 2 x 2 systems utilizing both step-response and PRBS closed-loop data

Hydrothermal Liquefaction Biocrude Stabilization via Hydrotreatment

The main objective of the manuscript is to investigate mild hydrotreatment upgrading of hydrothermal liquefaction biocrude to improve its stability and energy content. To that end, biocrude hydrotreatment was performed, exploring three different operating windows in order to examine the effect of reaction temperature and hydrogen supply on deoxygenation reactions. A typical NiMo/Al2O3 hydrotreating catalyst was utilized while the experiments were performed in a continuous-flow TRL 3 hydrotreatment plant. The results show that the resulting product has a higher carbon content as compared to the raw feed. The oxygenated compounds were removed, leading to a product with almost zero oxygen and water content, with high energy density. The reaction pathways during the hydrotreatment upgrading of biocrude were investigated via GC-MS analysis and presented in detail in the manuscript. In general, the hydrotreating process was able to improve the quality of the initial biocrude, allowing easier handling and storing for further upgrading, or to be used as an intermediate refinery stream