At TU Wien (Vienna), methods are being developed to extract valuable substances from biomass – and quantum cascade lasers offer some very interesting new possibilities.
At TU Wien (Vienna), methods are being developed to extract valuable substances from biomass – and quantum cascade lasers offer some very interesting new possibilities.
Much of our waste is far too valuable to simply be incinerated. If it is recycled in a carefully controlled way, not only can thermal energy be generated, but the resulting gas can also be used to produce valuable chemicals - from hydrogen to methane or methanol. However, the gas production process needs to be closely monitored and regulated.
Until now, a very common by-product of gasification – water vapor – has been a particular headache. To control gasification efficiently, it is important to know the water content of the product gas as accurately as possible. However, conventional methods make it difficult to measure the water content. In a collaboration between process engineering and photonics at TU Wien (Vienna), this problem has now been solved using a very special type of light source: terahertz radiation from a quantum cascade laser. State-of-the-art quantum technology now supports environmentally friendly biomass recycling.
Read more at Vienna University of Technology
