IIT-M taps AI to study biomass-fuel conversion

Indian Institute of Technology - Madras researchers are using Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools to study the processes involved in the conversion of biomass to gaseous fuel.

The institute in a release on Wednesday stated that gaining such understanding through hands-on experiments is time-consuming and expensive. Computer simulations and modelling studies can provide quicker insights that can be used to build the processes and plants for biomass processing.

With increasing environmental concerns associated with petroleum-derived fuels, biomass is a practical solution, not in the conventional sense of directly burning wood, cow dung cakes, and coal, but as a source of energy-dense fuel. Researchers all over the world are finding methods to extract fuel from biomass such as wood, grass, and even waste organic matter.

Such biomass-derived fuel is particularly relevant to India because the current availability of biomass in India is estimated at about 750 million metric tonnes per year and extracting fuel from them can tremendously help the country attain fuel self-sufficiency.

The research was led by Dr Himanshu Goyal, Assistant Professor, Department of Chemical Engineering, IIT Madras, and Dr Niket S Kaisare, Professor, Department of Chemical Engineering, IIT Madras, the release added.