From October 1st to October 5th 2017, the “10th World Congress of Chemical Engineering” was held in Barcelona, Spain. More than 3000 delegates presenting and listening to more than 1500 oral communications led to the event that managed to represent the chemical engineering and its thriving ideas and innovation as a whole. Due to the widespread topics, the focus is put on the talks given by the members of the Waste2Fuels consortium.

Dr Martin Miltner (TU Wien) presented “Membrane processes as the key technology in the cascaded valorization of municipal organic waste” showing the newest findings in the practical efforts of Butanol enrichment from ABE fermentation broth by pervaporation. His colleague Florian Kirchbacher (TU Wien) put his focus on the optimization of a coupled pervaporation/distillation process to reduce the energy demand of the purification process. The work was carried out using Aspen Plus® and showed potential energy savings of up to 50% and this could be even further improved by adopted membrane properties.

The “10th World Congress of Chemical Engineering” offered a very welcoming platform to present the newest insights gained in the Waste2Fuels project to a very broad audience. The discussions after the respective talks showed that interest in biofuels and particularly in biobutanol is very high and pointing to a bright future for this and upcoming projects in this field.