bright coatings

creating green coatings from biomass residues

In 1932, the Dutch Organisation for applied scientific research was established by law: TNO. TNO is an independent research organization that focuses on various social transitions towards a sustainable future, one of which is the domain: the Circular Economy and the Environment. As an organization, TNO connects people and their knowledge to create innovations that boost the competitive strength of the industry and the well-being of society in a sustainable way. TNO develops knowledge for the practical application of it in creating a more sustainable society. 

With the establishment of the Biorizon Shared Research Center in 2013, which is an initiative from both TNO and VITO, TNO set itself the goal of creating a technologically and economically feasible value chain from biomass, through furan building blocks to bio-aromatics, in collaboration with the industry and other knowledge institutes. With the Bio-Aromatics4Coatings project TNO has worked towards producing biobased aromatics, and through the Bright Coatings project, TNO wants to both scale-up the production of bio-aromatics to an industrial scale, as well as provide a demonstration of the high performance alternative to fossil-based aromatics. Furthermore, TNO has an unique proposition to valorise industrial crude (non-pure) hemicellulose into 2-methylfuran. This will be further developed in Bright-Coatings. 



TNO (Sustainable Process & Energy Systems) is specialized in the development and up-scaling of biobased processes and has a broad range of experience with the designing, building and up-starting of pilot units (up to TRL5) in the field of conversion- and purification processes. The required facilities for the conversion of hemicellulose to furfural are present at the Green Chemistry Campus in Bergen op Zoom. As mentioned prior, in the Bio-Aromatics4Coatings TNO gained knowledge and expertise in the production of bio-MPA. 

Furthermore, TNO will assess both the sustainability (life-cycle analysis) and techno-economic feasibility of the value chain realized in this project compared to the established petrochemical value chain. TNO has an extended track record in the field of doing life-cycle analyses and techno-economic evaluations.