ABPDU’s Ning Sun, a recent awardee of a U.S. Department of Energy Technology Commercialization Fund (TCF) Award, is featured in this Q&A in which she shares her experience with the TCF program as well as tips for potential applicants.
“The TCF award was very helpful. I had gotten DOE seedling funds to generate preliminary data for my project to convert lignin into ionic liquids, which are superior solvents or catalysts for a range of industrial applications,” Sun said. “We then used that data to apply for the TCF award, which is enabling us to go from the modeling stage to actually using commercial lignin to produce ionic liquids. We have now figured out how to produce and purify the intermediate, and so are getting closer to our goal of a scalable and economically viable process for this conversion.”
Read the full Q&A on Berkeley Lab’s Strategic Partnerships Office site.