To meet environmental commitments, France must regularly limit its greenhouse gas emissions to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050. For this purpose, the implementation of the hydrogen chain should allow to make a major contribution to the decarbonation of our heavy transport and industries. Among alternative solutions, the massive production of renewable (or low-carbon) hydrogen, based on the water electrolysis process gives high hopes.
The PHD project is placed in the context of recycling and recovery of hydrocarbon products such as tires and used plastics. A possible way of reprocessing concerns the py-oils resulting from these products. These, although they can be considered as unconventional, have a calorific value at least similar to current fuels and are chemically stable. They can be directly or indirectly recycled by hydrotreatment and fractionation stages into fuels of interest.
IFPEN aims to become a key player in the triple energy, ecological and digital transition by offering differentiating technological solutions in response to the societal and industrial challenges of energy and climate. Some of the targeted technologies are industrial processes to produce biofuels, bioproducts and the recycling of plastics. Research and development efforts must be intensified for these applications.
With the aim of reducing CO2 emissions in the transport sector, various technologies and energy carriers are being studied to gradually replace fossil fuels: biofuel or hydrogen thermal engines, electrification of the propulsion chain with batteries or low-temperature fuel cells. The latter technology is strongly recommended for heavy mobility (commercial vehicles, buses, heavy goods vehicles, rail, and sea).
The control of the textural properties of alumina supports is a crucial issue in the manufacturing of novel catalytic materials. Indeed, mass transport inside the porous medium is strongly affected by the micro-structure and may decrease the impregnation efficiency of the active phase leading to a loss of catalytic activity. Alumina carriers are constituted of elementary crystals (of a few Å) formed during the precipitation step, that stick together to form aggregates (of a few nm). These clusters can become intertwined to form agglomerates (of 100 nm to 1 µm).
The PhD project is proposed in the context of the transformation of sugars into fine chemicals, more specifically fructose into platform molecules for the chemical industry. The goal of the project is to understand and rationalize the reaction mechanisms of sugars by combined experimental and theoretical approaches. In particular, the selectivity of the transformations will be addressed, especially the pathways leading to oligomers and humins, mainly responsible of the efficiency losses in the transformation of sugars.
The development of specific liquid-liquid extraction operations is crucial for various bio-chemical processes, such as the production of biofuels. This technique is based on the differential solute affinity between two immiscible liquid phases. To enhance solute transfer, one of the phases is usually broken down into droplets to increase the exchange surface.
Plastic wastes recycling is a major environmental issue. Although European regulations are initiating major changes in terms of collection and incorporation of recycled materials, technologies for recycling such complex streams still must be developed. This problem is particularly true when the recyclates are intended for food use: meeting purity standards of the virgin materials is most often mandatory. The use of solvents to dissolve or depolymerize these materials is well suited because it allows an easier elimination of impurities.
The PhD project is proposed in the context of PET waste chemical recycling into PET, via depolymerization. Chemical recycling is needed when plastic feedstocks cannot be mechanically processed, usually for non-transparent PET. The goal of the project is to understand and rationalize the catalytic mechanisms of inherited substances that act as catalysts during the recyling process, which are inherited catalysts from PET polycondensation and some additives.
Greenhouse gas emissions are one of the main research areas at IFPEN. Through the solutions panel for reducing such emissions, Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) represents between 15 to 30% of the total required work to achieve, following the different constructed models for climate prediction. This important challenge claims for continuous innovation and development of more efficient solutions for a large and accelerated technology deployment.