Jefferson W. Tester’66 ChE, M.S. ’67, is the first Croll Professorship of Sustainable Energy Systems and associate director for energy in the Cornell Center for a Sustainable Future. His current research interests include renewable and geothermal energy systems analysis, flame spallation methods for ultra deep drilling, chemical reforming and upgrading of biomass and unconventional fossil fuels, and carbon capture and sequestration in geologic systems.

“Our group employs an evolving set of experimental and theoretical capabilities in chemical engineering science and process-level research,” says Tester. “We have been active in examining chemical and physical transformations at extreme conditions of temperature and pressure in hydrothermal and supercritical media with a natural focus on renewable energy capture and conversion, and cleaner, more sustainable chemical processing using green chemistry methods. Key goals are to develop new, enabling technologies that will increase access to currently underutilized energy resources and to provide more efficient ways of manufacturing fuels with lower environmental damages across their complete life cycle.”

Tester’s research projects include studies of flame drilling and hydrothermal liquefaction and gasification of biomass such as wood and food processing wastes. These projects deal with characterizing phase and chemical reaction transformation kinetics and reaction pathway analysis, salt formation dynamics and separation, molecular thermodynamics modeling of mixed water-hydrocarbon-salt systems, equation of state modeling and process simulation, and life cycle analysis of energy and mass flows.  

Jeff Tester's Web page