Massimiliano Materazzi | UCL Department of Chemical Engineering – UCL – University College London

Research summary

Massimiliano has been leading research in Bioenergy and Biofuels at UCL since 2015. His research focuses on the major sustainability challenges contextualised by UCL’s Grand Challenges and the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to achieve higher resource efficiency with sustainable, environmentally responsible production. He does so by bridging fundamental knowledge on particle technologies and catalysis with the engineering design and scale-up of advanced technologies for sustainable applications, underpinning this with techno-economic analysis and commercial assessment. Main areas of research include:

1) Advanced thermal treatments (incineration, gasification, pyrolysis, plasma) for conversion of biomass and wastes into renewable energy and biofuels, including hydrogen for transport and sustainable aviation fuels (SAF);

2) Novel Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) technologies for reducing impact of industries; 

3) Design and operation criteria of industrial reactors for Sustainable Manufacturing;

4) Technological, economic and environmental aspects of the different recycling and recovery routes (mechanical recycling, chemical recycling and energy recovery) of plastic waste;

5) Integration and optimization of Food-Energy-Water nexus to foster collective resilience in urban-rural systems;

6) Application of Life Cycle Assessment and Material Flow Analysis as tools for environmental assessment of waste management planning and optimization.

His research is supported by sustained funding from Industry, Charity, Engineering Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC), Energy Technology Institute (ETI), Innovate UK, Department for Transport and BEIS. In 2018 he received the prestigious 5-year RAEng Research Fellowship to advance thermochemical technologies for biofuel synthesis. His early results have contributed to the construction of the first 5MW Waste-to-Fuel plant in the UK (Swindon), funded by the Department for Transport (DfT), which will start operation in 2022. The same project has granted his team 3 IChemE Global Awards (2018), in Energy, Sustainability and Outstanding Achievement in Chemical Engineering, providing worldwide visibility to his research.