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Engineering and technology
- Separation technologies
- Environmental technologies
- Fermentation
Globally, the waste biomass potential for production of value-added products such as plastics precursors is at the level of millions of tons. However, to date a major bottleneck is the heterogeneity and complexity of the biomass which makes production and separation of a pure product highly complex. We are developing novel electrochemical technologies that can address this issue, in which we use microbiome based fermentations, potentially in combination with hydrolysis, as a first step to break down the biomass in mixtures of organic acids. These can be fermented in a second phase where we use electrochemistry to create purified fluids containing the acidied organics. In multiple instances, we can then separate these via phase separations: caproic acid separates as a liquid from water, succinic acid crystallizes out... in this project, we want to develop this electrochemical processing line to create different types of organic products, particularly separated via crystallization.