At our Consortium Meeting at month 30 of the project, it became clear that the development of results is now strongly underway. The first tasks have successfully been completed, with enough isolated lignin supplied to let the process engineers at VITO scale up the continuous depolymerisation. That process has successfully been translated from lab to pilot scale – not only in an initial experiment but reproducibly in a stable process.
We can already disclose that a first several-day long run has been successfully concluded. More info will follow soon! The large quantities of depolymerised lignin oil are now available for the downstream work packages.
VITO will soon test the in-line monitoring of lignin depolymerisation pioneered by Utrecht University.
The application developers are continuing to test the different depolymerised lignin preparations to identify the most promising (and economically viable) combination for each application.
In Work Package 4, work continues the analysis of mass and energy balances, but in a first pass, partners were able to report that overall environmental aspects were successfully improved, meaning solvent and heat use could be reduced significantly.
In a forward-looking workshop during meeting, partners discussed the exploitation of project results in a changing environment. The session focused on how to integrate evolving framework conditions when planning exploitation pathways.