Seminar: Bastien Sanglard, postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Sustainable Materials

Human influence on the environment is now clearly established as most of our activities are either directly or indirectly based on fossil resources. The framework of this presentation falls in the challenge to improve the global impact of both low and high temperature processes. To do so, two specific industries were targeted: the agribusiness and food transformation as the low temperature industry and the metallurgy as the high temperature industry, in particular the direct reduction process. In the first case, the question of the heat source has been specifically studied through the use of concentrated solar power. This led to the production of a comprehensive life cycle assessment of family size solar cookers compared to classical European cooking appliances, as well as to the characterization of community size solar cookers based on the standard test methods. The results of this research show a strong ecological advantage of solar power over the conventional cooking techniques and, that this heat source also shows its relevance to transform food at larger quantity. Both these previous aspects show that concentrated solar power seems suitable for agribusiness. To study the potential for sustainability of the direct reduction, both the heat source and the reducers were targeted. Firstly, through the use of concentrated light flux and secondly through the research of alternative source of hydrogen such as urea or waste polymers. The results of these studies shown that the concentrated solar power allowed to reduce iron ore up to an industrial requirement. It also shows that both the use of urea and polymer were suitable as an alternative of fossil-based reducers. Overall, this global approach shows that considering the concentrated solar power as one of the heat sources to lower the impact of the industry is credible.