Case Study: National Renewable Energy Laboratory achieves cost-effective biofuel production with COMSOL Multiphysics

National Renewable Energy Laboratory - Customer Case Study

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) aimed to make plant-derived biofuels cost-effective by improving fast pyrolysis, but faced economic barriers due to incomplete understanding of the multiphysics processes in biomass particles—heat and mass transfer, phase change, and reactions that depend on particle size, shape, and internal microstructure. To tackle this, NREL researchers used Comsol Multiphysics software to build detailed 3D biomass geometries from imaging data and to set up coupled physics simulations that capture the real particle morphology.

Using Comsol, the team generated microstructured solid models and ran conjugate heat transfer and mass-transport simulations on an HPC cluster to quantify transient heating and diffusion (for example, internal temperatures approaching ~500°C within seconds and detailed temperature distributions at 0.5 s). The results showed microstructured models are more accurate than simplified spherical models, produced actionable correlations for low-order reactor models, and provide inputs for optimizing large-scale reactor design—helping reduce uncertainty, improve reactor efficiency, and move biofuel production toward greater cost-effectiveness.

National Renewable Energy Laboratory

Peter Ciesielski

Research Scientist