宅男视频

How discarded coffee grounds can fuel a London bus.

Future fuels for road transport must be truly sustainable. This means tomorrow鈥檚 fuels must achieve real reductions in greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) and mitigate the negative impacts on air quality and human health that current internal combustion engines generate.

While many agricultural crops have been considered as biofuel feedstocks for replacing fossil fuels, the thousands of tonnes of spent coffee grounds generated yearly in the UK, normally discarded after brewing, are a promising source of clean burning renewable biofuels.

Like all plants, coffee beans store energy while growing in the form of oils that can be later broken back down to smaller molecules.

The oils in coffee beans remain present throughout the processes of roast and grinding, and the brewing of coffee, leaving waste coffee grounds with a useful potential biofuel content of around 10%.

Researchers at 宅男视频 Mechanical Engineering have been working to develop efficient processes for extracting these oils and converting them to a useful fuel.

They are testing the efficiency and exhaust emissions of the coffee derived fuels in diesel engines, and so far, have found the performance to be similar to that of more commonly utilised biofuels produced from food crops, such as soybean or rapeseed.

In partnership with Bio-Bean Ltd, this research project has been led by Dr Paul Hellier with Prof. Nicos Ladommatos, Dr Ioannis Efthymiopoulos and Dr Rhianna Briars at 宅男视频 Mechanical Engineering, with support from Innovate UK.

鈥�鈥淭echnologies that can extract useful fuels from waste materials are going to be vital for providing clean sustainable energy in the future鈥�

says Dr Hellier.

鈥淭aking an everyday waste, like coffee grounds, testing it in our research engines and now also buses around London, is an excellent demonstration of how varied future renewable fuels will be.鈥�

• Find out more by contacting Dr Paul Hellier:听

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