It was once a commercial airliner’s auxiliary power unit, but now it serves as a testbed for novel fuels being developed in the lab next door.
The setup is the focal point of Sheffield University’s Sustainable Fuels Innovation Centre (SAF-IC), a research facility designed to enable small-scale preparation and evaluation of synthetic fuels prior to their large-scale production.
Ihab can watch the engine power up and start with a blast of flame on a bank of computer displays in a neighboring control room.
He can see what the engine is doing thanks to sensors.
Sustainable fuels are man-made, renewable-source substitutes for fossil fuels.
These can contain carbon dioxide that has been captured, as well as leftover cooking and vegetable fats and agricultural waste.
Burning fuels such as these has the benefit of not contributing to the atmosphere’s total carbon dioxide burden.
It is only recently that plants or chemical processes have taken up the carbon that was released. In contrast, carbon that has been deposited in the earth for millions of years is released when fossil fuels are burned.
