Abstract Innovative and sustainable processes for the conversion of whole plants into fuels are developed in the cluster of excellence “Tailor-Made Fuels from Biomass” (TMFB) at RWTH Aachen University. In order to guarantee an efficient production a large number of process alternatives needs to be evaluated systematically at an early design stage, including both preliminary research results and literature knowledge. In order to review potential chemical synthesis routes, a rapid screening method is developed to detect andto classify all combinations of reaction steps using mixed integer programming. Based on these results promising reaction pathways as well as bottlenecks can be identified and a first insight in possible process chains can be gained. This paper introduces the scope and the methodology of the approach and illustrates both on an appropriate example.
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