Vincent Goovaerts

Please introduce yourself and your role in the project.

 
My name is Vincent Goovaerts, I am the R&D director at MEAM, which is an abbreviation for microwave energy applications management, and in the project I am the internal coordinator for MEAM. So, overseeing the practical tests work and the simulations that we do in the ēQATOR project. 

 

How did you learn about the project and become a partner? 

 
We learned about the project of the call and then by Jean Luc Dubois of Arkema. And then, together with NextChem, we started to set up some partners for a consortium. And after a few discussions between us, we saw that there was a similar consortium forming with SINTEF as the lead and we decided that it was a better chance of success to combine those two, which also proved to be the case. 

 
What is your organisation's role in the project, and what expertise do you bring to the table? 

 

So MEAM is an all-in-solution provider for industrial microwave technology, so it can go from test setups to production machines and in this project we mainly develop the microwave reactor and do the optimization of it. So in the test centre, we have some batch systems for the lab scale testing. Which we can variate all kinds of parameters, for instance with vacuum or high-pressure tanks. And we also have other, larger scale, for the upscaling test work, so that we can also do the higher temperature range applications as is the case for this ēQATOR project. 

 

How is your organisation collaborating with other partners in the project? 

 
We have two main collaborations in in the project, and the first one is with SINTEF, where we will develop and build a microwave heating ISMA reactor, so an in-situ mass analyser, to study the kinetics of carbon formation on the catalysts. And the second one is then with the partners of the 5th work package, where the pilot plant or the so-called demonstrator will be built. 

 
How do your project activities contribute to the goal of the project to achieve a cost-competitive renewable methanol production with near zero CO2 emissions? 

 
Yeah, in in this project we will use microwave technology for the electrically heated catalytic reactors, and we can use renewable energy sources like solar or wind energy to convert it to this electricity, so that we can avoid using fossil fuels. So this will already be a quite big lowering of the CO2 emissions. And additionally, the size reduction of the reactor and the reduction of the catalyst volume that will be needed, because we won't heat up the entire reactor, but just the catalyst, in the most ideal case, will also further contribute to lowering the CO2 emissions. 

 
Regarding your tasks, what do you expect are or will be the greatest challenges during the project? 

 

The biggest challenge will be to have a catalyst that is suitable for this reaction, because there are many catalysts known to speed up the reaction, but the extra difficulty comes from the fact that it needs to be a microwave absorbent catalyst and that is stable under these conditions. So, if we cannot find this specific catalyst in the project frame, we can also go to plan B, which is then to have support that will absorb the microwave energy. And second challenge is the coke formation that is a side product of the reaction, because the coke will also absorb the microwave energy very efficiently. So we need to avoid this to a large extent, so that we don't have any thermal runaways inside of the reactor. 

 

If you had one wish regarding the project, what would it be? 

 
Um, my wish would be to have a fruitful and enjoyable collaboration with all the partners, while, of course, achieving the goals that were set in the project.