The project is aimed at studying the availability of zeolites to act as catalysts in the chemical conversion of lignin-derived compounds.  Lignin is one of the main components of the biomass together with cellulose and hemicellulose.  However, its optimum use as fuel and/or source of more valuable chemicals is limited by its high degree of polymerization and oxygen content.  Hence, effective catalytic methods are necessary to firstly depolymerize the lignin, and then process the resultant set of chemical building blocks.

The project focuses mainly on the aftermath of the depolymerisation, which means, the processing of the lignin-derived compounds using zeolites as catalysts.  Zeolites gather several features that make this kind of material a good candidate: (i) environmentally friendly, (ii) possess a crystalline structure thermally stable, (iii) impose molecular size selectivity with their micropore system, (iv) additional electronic and acidic characteristics are introduced through chemical modifications, to just mention few examples.  We consider that the computational chemistry tools applied on our theoretical models and powered by High Performance Computing Clusters, may help to understand the existing experimental data, and design new zeolite-based catalysts.