In many ways, biofuel research is like modern day alchemy. The transmutation of biomass materials — which includes anything from kitchen and latrine waste to stalky, non-edible plants — into a sustainable and renewable energy source involves catalysts and chemical reactions. The process promises to help meet the world’s critical energy challenges.
Biofuel research can also be thought of as the ultimate multi-scale, multi-physics research problem. It represents several interesting biological supply-chain management problems. Not surprisingly, biofuel research spans several domains here at Argonne, and takes place in wet labs and joint institutes across the lab campus. There is also an exciting INCITE research project going on in the ALCF aimed at finding a more effective way to convert plant materials that contain cellulose, such as wood chips and switchgrass, into sugars, and then converted into biofuels.
A science team from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory is using Mira to conduct large-scale simulations of the complex cellulose-to-sugar conversion process. Researchers are able to obtain data, such as the level of an enzyme’s binding free energy, which is difficult to obtain through conventional experimental approaches, helping to accelerate the process of screening and testing new enzymes. With such information, researchers will be able to identify potential enzyme modifications and then feed their discoveries into experiments aimed at developing and validating improved catalysts. Read the full research highlight here.