Energy systems engineering
Munich, Germany
An independent energy-systems practice: plant-wide process models, techno-economic assessment and multi-objective optimisation for Power-to-X, carbon capture and biowaste valorisation.
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7 in the global top 1% most cited
Engaged where deep decarbonisation, Power-to-X or CCUS process modelling is the bottleneck, for technology developers, industrial operators, investors and research consortia.
A concept looks promising and nobody can say whether it pays. The spreadsheet that answers it keeps disagreeing with itself.
You need plant-wide heat and mass balances that hold together, not four unit models that each work alone.
Cost, efficiency and emissions pull in different directions, and picking one weighting up front hides the decision you are actually making.
Someone else's model says the project works. You need an independent read before the money moves.
The rigorous model takes hours per run, so nobody explores the design space: they run it three times and pick the best.
You need the capability in-house, or a funded research partner who can co-write the proposal and then deliver on it.
A Power-to-X plant is four decisions in a row, and each one changes the economics of the next. The work is sizing them together, not optimising a stack in isolation and hoping the synthesis loop agrees.
Leaving this stage
Electricity
Variable renewable power sets the plant's duty cycle. The electrolyser has to follow it, not the other way round.
Touring the chain. Select a stage to hold it.
Active · October 2026 – September 2028
Upgrading biogas to grid quality means stripping out 35–45 vol% CO₂, a stream that is already captured, biogenic, and concentrated. Almost all of it is vented. Hydrogenating that CO₂ instead lifts a plant's methane output by roughly 60% from feedstock it already handles, without a single additional hectare of land.
Technical University of Munich · Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship
Four stages, from feedstock to end use
Every link the optimiser may select
Hydrogen, methane, methanol, ammonia
From hydrogenating the CO₂ already separated
Four working models, free to use and free of sign-up. They run entirely in your browser, nothing you type is sent anywhere, and every default is a literature value with its range shown, so you can see immediately whether your case sits inside it.
Full levelised cost: capital recovery, electricity, fixed O&M, discounted stack replacements and water. Then a sensitivity ranking that shows which two assumptions the answer really turns on.
Routes a wind or solar input through electrolysis into hydrogen, e-methane, e-methanol or e-ammonia, closing the mass balance stoichiometrically and the energy balance stage by stage.
Anaerobic digestion yields for real feedstocks, then the step most plants skip: what the biogenic CO₂ separated during upgrading is worth if it is hydrogenated instead of vented.
Alkaline, PEM, SOEC and AEM side by side on the parameters that decide the choice (specific consumption, capital cost, stack life, minimum load and readiness), with the trade-offs stated rather than implied.
Four steps, because that is genuinely the shape of it. The first one is where most projects are won or lost.
What decision is the model for? A go/no-go, an equipment size, a tariff negotiation and a permit application need different models, and building the wrong one is the most expensive mistake available.
Plant-wide mass and energy balances, built in Aspen, HYSYS, MATLAB or Python and validated against published data before any conclusion is drawn from them.
Multi-objective optimisation over the design space (NSGA-II, MOPSO, MOGWO) with machine-learning surrogates where the thermodynamic model is too slow to search directly.
Techno-economic and exergy results, a sensitivity ranking that shows which assumptions actually matter, and a written recommendation you can hand to a board.
Available for industrial consulting, technical due diligence and research partnerships, alongside student supervision and sponsored work in Power-to-X, CCUS and biowaste valorisation.