Press and Media

The Sulzbach-Rosenberg branch of the Fraunhofer Institute UMSICHT has a new director. On 1 March, Prof. Dr.-Ing. Matthias Franke took over the leadership role from Prof. Dr. Andreas Hornung. Hornung will remain with the institute section as Senior Expert for Bioeconomy. Samir Binder continues to be the deputy head of the institute section.

Phy2Climate - A global approach to reclaiming agricultural land through a combination of phytoremediation, biofuel production and climate-friendly copper smelting.

We thank you for the trustful cooperation and your support in this extraordinary year. The crisis has shown us once again what a transformation of the economy towards sustainable energy production and recycling of resources also means: becoming more resilient to disruptions. Many of our ongoing projects, as well as new ones, are helping to increase the resilience of our society.

A novel electrochemical purification process for highly contaminated process wastewater is to generate hydrogen at the same time. In the AECO H2+ project, a test stand with electrolysis cell is being set-up to undertake test for industrial use of the technology. The project is carried out by Fraunhofer UMSICHT at its Sulzbach-Rosenberg site with the industrial partners DiaCCon GmbH (Fürth, www.diaccon.de) and Blue Eden CleanTech Inc. (Calgary, Canada, www.blueeden.ca) and is funded within the framework of the Central Innovation Program for Medium-Sized Enterprises (ZIM).

In the To-Syn-Fuel plant, sewage sludge is converted in Fraunhofers Thermo-catalytic reforming (TCR) system into valuable solid, liquid and gas fractions. The produced liquid bio-oil is refined to suitable fuels using the hydrogen from the produced TCR gas fraction. Hydrogen is separated from other species, like carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide and methane using one of project partner HyGear’s key technologies: Pressure Swing Adsorption (PSA).

Out of more than 300 EU-funded biotech projects, the flexJET project for the production of sustainable aircraft fuels was selected as the one with the best chances of commercialization. The prize was awarded by the industry experts of the European KETBIO Biotech Transfer Initiative. Within the framework of flexJET, 1200 tons of sustainable aviation fuel are produced from used cooking oils. The hydrogen required for the hydrogenation of the oils comes from biogenic residues. It is produced using the TCR® process developed by Fraunhofer.

Since January 2017, the Fraunhofer Institute for Environmental, Safety and Energy Technology in Sulzbach-Rosenberg has been working on a waste management plan for the Emirate of Kuwait on behalf of the Kuwaiti environmental authority. As part of the air quality monitoring sub-project, a network of 100 online electronic noses, or eNOSES for short, was installed in odour-intensive areas with a focus on waste management facilities and fully commissioned in April 2020. The aim is to monitor odours online continuously over the long term. eNOSES are devices that perceive odours in a similar way to a human nose and can therefore detect anomalies.