LEAPS (Leading Energy-Transition Advances and Pathways to Sustainability) stands at the forefront of a public-private partnership dedicated to fostering next-generation technologies and strategies pivotal for the energy transition. This initiative is set to enhance U.S. manufacturing competitiveness and national prosperity by introducing efficient, cost-effective process innovations that significantly reduce waste and emissions in manufacturing. As a national hub for scaling industrial innovations, LEAPS will play a crucial role in improving industry efficiency, boosting global competitiveness, navigating new regulatory landscapes, and reducing waste, energy consumption, and emissions.

Purdue University, with its longstanding history of cross-departmental industrial innovations and a strategic location at the heart of America, is poised to lead this initiative. By forming a consortium with the regional Midwest industrial sector, Purdue will foster a culture of leadership and innovation combined with industry guidance and partnership that will have far-reaching impacts.

THE FOCUS:

• Identify and advance technologies in energy efficiency, recycling, indirect emissions, and renewable energy applications, including fuel switching, carbon capture, and combined heat and power systems that yield benefits not only regionally but also on a global scale, contributing to a path toward worldwide sustainability.

THE LEAPS CONSORTIUM:

• Encompass the full value chain across various industries, offering partners access to Purdue's innovative students and faculty and facilitating cross-sector collaborations.
• Accelerate the development of essential new technologies for the energy transition.
• Utilize Purdue's unique facilities specializing in mid-level Technology Readiness Levels (TRL 4-6), such as the Grainger Energy Conversion and Microgrids Laboratory, the Grainger Power Magnetics Fabrication Laboratory, the Electric Vehicle Systems Laboratory, Maurice J. Zucrow Laboratories, Ray W. Herrick Laboratories, and Purdue University's Reactor PUR-1. These facilities are vital in transforming theoretical research into market-ready technologies.

WE WILL:

• Engage with cutting-edge research and development that positions industries at the forefront of energy innovation.
• Foster the creation of value-driven sustainable technologies to not only match but ideally exceed the performance of current fossil fuel-based systems. At a minimum, they are designed to integrate with and enhance legacy technologies, adding significant value.

Through this consortium, Purdue University and its industry partners are dedicated to leading the energy transition, making substantial contributions to sustainable progress at both national and global levels.

CIVS - Steel Consortium

The SMSVC, housed at CIVS, is a nationwide, industry-led consortium of steel producers and suppliers—including energy suppliers and utility companies—whose purpose is to address major technological issues and barriers related to growth, and to ensure a competitive advantage for American steel manufacturing.

Aspire

The Purdue Center for Heat Treating

The Purdue Center for Heat Treating, an industrially funded consortium based around heat treating metals supporting approximately $250k in direct research activities, has several currently projects supporting decarbonization efforts. From developing bio-based renewable quench oils to creating an energy inventory for heat treat processes, faculty involved in this center (including but not limited to Jeff Youngblood, Mike Titus, Fu Zhao, Kevin Trumble and David Johnson) are directly working on industrially relevant processes in the manufacturing sector. More information, including the member companies and the managing director, Dr. Mark Grunninger, can be found at https://engineering.purdue.edu/MSE/PHTC

CARES: Center for Advances in Resilient Energy Storage

The overarching mission of CARES (Center for Advances in Resilient Energy Storage) is to develop a science-based foundation of energy storage safety, sustainability, and resilience. Through an integrated scale-bridging approach, including physics-based modeling and high-resolution experimental analytics, the vision of CARES is to delineate electrochemically coupled mechanistic interactions at spatiotemporal scales and derive implications in the safety and resilience of emergent energy storage architectures and systems.

The Laboratory of Renewable Resources Engineering (LORRE)

LORRE is working with industry partners to translate developments in bioprocessing of lignocellulosic feedstocks to low carbon footprint biofuels and bioproducts. These include long-standing cooperation with the major ethanol producers, as well as companies that have collaborated through DOE funded, cross-disciplinary, multi-investigator effort (Purdue, industry, National Laboratories) during 2018-2023. This research and related topics have achieved scalable liquefaction and fermentation of high concentration slurries of corn stover in aa manner that enables large-scale bioprocessing in biorefineries.