| | | | | | From Brewery to Biofilter: Making Yeast-Based Water Purification Possible |
| When looking for an environmentally friendly and cost-effective way to clean up contaminated water and soil, Georgia Tech researchers Patricia Stathatou and Christos Athanasiou turned to yeast. A cheap byproduct from fermentation processes — e.g., something your local brewery discards in mass quantities after making a batch of beer — yeast is widely known as an effective biosorbent. Biosorption is a mass transfer process by which an ion or molecule binds to inactive biological materials through physicochemical interactions.
When they initially studied this process, Stathatou and Athanasiou found that yeast can effectively and rapidly remove trace lead — at challenging initial concentrations below one part per million — from drinking water. Conventional water treatment methods either fail to eliminate lead at these low levels or result in high financial and environmental costs to do so. In a paper published today in RSC Sustainability, the researchers show how this process can be scaled.
“If you put yeast directly into water to clean it, you will need an additional treatment step to remove the yeast from the water afterward,” said Stathatou, a research scientist at the Renewable Bioproducts Institute and an incoming assistant professor at the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. “To implement this process at scale without requiring additional separation steps, the yeast cells need a housing.” |
| | | | Undergraduates Venture on Field Trips for Real-World Experiences |
| Students in the Pulp and Paper Certification Program at Georgia Tech had real-world experiences outside the classroom this spring. Over 30 students taking the Emerging Technologies in the Manufacture of Forest Bioproducts course (CHBE/ME 4730/8803) took field trips to Greif’s Austell location and GranBio’s Thomaston facility in Georgia. The course is taught by Chris Luettgen, Professor of the Practice and Initiative Lead for Process Efficiency & Intensification of Pulp Paper Packaging & Tissue Manufacturing at Georgia Tech's Renewable Bioproducts Institute.
At the Sweetwater Mill, one of Greif’s three paper mills in Austell, the students saw the pressure cylinder machine, a pre-coater that smoothens the board for printability, and a curtain coater that makes value-added products such as one-sided chipboard packaging for retail displays. The mill runs 100% recycled fiber into stock cores, gypsum board liners, and chipboard packaging. The tour included converting the machine roll (called a parent roll) into smaller rolls that will be further converted at downstream customers’ locations.
At the GranBio’s facility in Thomaston, Tech students were able to see a biorefinery at work where a wide variety of lignocellulosic feedstocks, including wood chips, were getting converted into multiple bioproducts. They had a firsthand look at the SEW (sulfur dioxide, ethanol, and water) process, which was quite different from the traditional kraft pulping process. It creates a highly acidic mush, with a high pH, instead of fiber, which could then be used to make biofuels and other value-added products. In addition, they were able to discuss the recent DOE award to scale their process to a 100 ton/day biomass to Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF). The company explained that they were still in site selection and would be hiring engineers in the near future. |
| | | Foundational Paper by RBI’s Valerie Thomas Focuses on Addressing Biodiversity & Climate Change Mitigation Through Managed Forests |
| | Valerie Thomas, professor, Anderson-Interface Chair of Natural Systems in ISyE and RBI’s initiative lead for sustainability analysis has published a paper on managing forest for biodiversity and harvesting biomass. Co-authors of the paper include Cindy Azuero-Pedraza, a Ph.D. student at Georgia Tech, and two others from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, in Austria, which runs some of the main climate integrated assessment models. |
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| | | | Rupesh Khare of Grasim Industries Limited Presented at the Spring RBI Seminar Series |
| | | On April 22, 2024, the Renewable Bioproducts Institute hosted the Spring RBI Seminar Series. Rupesh Khare, a representative from RBI member company Grasim Industries Limited, traveled from India to share a presentation on “Circularity and Sustainability in Man Made Cellulosic Fibres: Opportunities and Challenges.” RBI’s next Seminar Series will happen this Fall. Let us know if there are any topics in particular that you would like to see covered. Stay tuned! |
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| | | | | | DE-FOA-0003374 - Request For Information (RFI) on Recovery of High Energy-Value Materials from Wastewater |
| Concept Paper Submission Deadline: TBD Full Application Submission Deadline: TBD
The purpose of this Request for Information (RFI) is to solicit input for a potential ARPA-E program focused on the development of technologies to recover high energy-value materials from wastewater to reduce energy demands and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with conventional sourcing and waste stream treatment. Wastewater in this RFI is broadly defined, and includes municipal, livestock, industrial, and mining sources. High energy-value materials under consideration are nutrients (i.e., ammonia and phosphorus) and critical minerals, where the latter are a group of 50 elements in the periodic table including lithium and rare earth elements (REEs). Ammonia losses from wastewater represent more than 50% of ammonia demand in the United States, requiring approximately 0.4 quads of energy per year to supply (quads/yr) and resulting in annual emissions of more than 60 million metric tons (MMT) of carbon dioxide equivalents (CO2 eq). Metal losses in select industrial and mining wastewaters can be large as well. For example, produced water contains sufficient lithium to provide all U.S. needs (e.g., approximately 3,000 metric tons in 2022), while select mining wastewater can contain milligram per liter (mg/L) quantities of select REEs (e.g., cerium and neodymium). The goals for this programmatic concept include the evaluation of technologies capable of efficiently recovering: Ammonia (or ammonia with phosphorus) as a high-quality feedstock for direct input to fertilizer supply chains or hydrogen carrier markets Critical minerals that can displace metal ore production or overseas procurement for domestic use
Capable technologies will be energy efficient, highly selective, and durable over extended use. Processes will involve few sequential steps and will be easily automated, easily adaptable to existing or new wastewater facilities, and scalable (e.g., modular). ARPA-E seeks input from environmental, chemical, mechanical, electrical, biological, and systems engineers, organic and inorganic chemists, microbiologists, and others with relevant expertise. Additionally, ARPA-E seeks input from prospective end users or beneficiaries of such technologies. These include, but are not limited to, water and wastewater utilities, metals mining and processing companies, oil and gas developers, semiconductor facilities, intensive animal farmers, fertilizer producers and distributors, and raw metal suppliers. This RFI is focused on soliciting input regarding novel approaches to recover industrial-grade high energy-value materials from wastewater that can directly enter existing supply chains. Such approaches may include but are not limited to: Highly selective separations that use adsorbents or membranes; Electrochemical, pressure, or thermal-driven separations; Catalytic, electrocatalytic, or biologically-facilitated reactions that promote recovery; Novel process designs that minimize energy use and maximize recovery; and Approaches to evaluate technical, economic, environmental, and technology-to-market feasibility of these strategies.
To view the RFI in its entirety, please visit https://arpa-e-foa.energy.gov. |
| | | Request for Information: Transforming Industry: Strategies for Decarbonization (DE-FOA-0003363) |
| Application Due Date: Jun 10, 2024 5 p.m. ET
This is a Request for Information (RFI) issued by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Industrial Efficiency and Decarbonization Office (IEDO). The intent of this RFI is to obtain information to inform a new DOE vision study, Pathways for U.S. Industrial Transformations: Unlocking American Innovation, which is identifying cost-effective and industry-specific strategic pathways to achieve a thriving U.S. industrial sector with net-zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2050.
This RFI seeks input on four categories: Category 1: Industrial Decarbonization Challenges, Barriers, and Cross-Cutting Strategies; Category 2: Framework for Industrial Decarbonization Pathways; Category 3: Impacts and Evaluation Criteria for Industrial Decarbonization Pathways; and Category 4: Net-zero Decarbonization Pathways for Specific Industrial Subsectors.
This RFI is focused on input on industrial technological, financial, social, environmental, and health aspects as they pertains to the challenges, barriers, opportunities, and pathways to achieve net-zero emissions from the industrial sector by 2050. IEDO seeks input from a diverse group of stakeholders (both within and outside of industry) who will be integral to the transformation of U.S. industry, including associated communities, utilities, low-carbon fuels suppliers, technology developers, engineering consultants, firms designing new facilities, local and regional governments, and more.
Responses should be submitted electronically to Transforming-Industry@ee.doe.gov. Include “Transforming Industry RFI” in the subject line of the email. Only electronic responses will be accepted and must be received by 5:00pm (ET) on June 10, 2024. This is solely a request for information and not a Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA). EERE is not accepting applications. |
| | | Request For Information (RFI) on Accelerating the Catalyst Development Cycle for Net Zero Applications |
| Applications Due: June 13, 2024 | 5 p.m. ET
The purpose of this Request for Information (RFI) is to solicit input for a potential ARPA-E program focused on accelerating the heterogeneous catalyst development cycle for incorporation into reactors, devices, equipment, unit operations, and process technology applications relevant to the U.S. 2050 net zero goals. These material development cycles can take decades to complete, starting from the discovery scale at milligram quantities and finishing at the development scale with kilogram quantities. ARPA-E is interested in decreasing the length of development cycles to months while capturing significant energy efficiency increases, emissions reductions, and/or precious metal reductions. Major bottlenecks in the process include inefficient discovery, irreproducible multi-scale synthesis, laborious characterization, narrow design space optimization, irrelevant performance evaluation, and impractical integration (i.e., not “drop-in”) of heterogeneous catalysts into emerging technologies. ARPA-E is interested in identifying potentially disruptive techniques or workflows that expedite: Integration of catalytic material discovery and synthesis with device (i.e., cell or reactor) performance in a rapid, parallel, automated, and/or combinatorial manner. Devices should operate under realistic working conditions and correlate to deployment at relevant scales. Utilization of hardware automation and modern data science to generate, handle, and process large quantities of high quality, multi-dimensional experimental data.
Such approaches must ultimately accelerate the optimization and feedback at each level of complexity from material synthesis to device. ARPA-E seeks input from experts in catalysis, acceleration, and computation. The tools and workflows of interest should be generalizable and applied to catalyst and process optimization activities across the same class of catalytic chemistry (e.g., electrochemical or thermochemical) that significantly impacts energy technologies of interest to ARPA-E. Areas Not of Interest for Responses to this RFI: Work focused on basic research aimed purely at fundamental knowledge generation. Experimental catalysis outside of electrochemical and thermochemical systems, including: Work focused purely on generating synthetic data.
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| | | | | | | BES Grant Writing Tips and Insights - Workshop
May 30, 2024 || 1 p.m. - 2 pm. EDT
The grant writing process can be daunting for early career scientists. In this webinar, we will have experts share their insights and experience on structuring the grant, the writing process, and building a compelling narrative. Questions from the audience as well as prepared questions will be addressed by the speakers. This zoom webinar is free and open to the public.
Speakers: Dr. David L. Clark is the Director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s National Security Education Center. He received a Ph.D. in chemistry in 1986 from Indiana University. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Oxford before joining Los Alamos National Laboratory as a J. Robert Oppenheimer Fellow in 1988. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a Los Alamos Laboratory Fellow, a recipient of two ACS national awards and two Defense Programs Awards of Excellence. His research interests are in the molecular and electronic structure of actinide materials, applications of synchrotron radiation to nuclear security, behavior of actinide and fission products in the environment, the aging effects of nuclear weapons materials, and the education of judges on the methods of science. He is an international authority on the chemistry and physics of the actinides, and has published over 180 peer-reviewed publications, encyclopedia and book chapters.
Dr. Jennifer Roizen serves as a program manager for the Solar Photochemistry program and the Fuels from Sunlight Hub in the Chemical Sciences, Geosciences and Biosciences Division in the DOE Office of Basic Energy Sciences. Dr. Roizen is also a member of the International Advisory Board for Angewandte Chemie. Dr. Roizen received her Ph.D. in organic chemistry in 2010 from California Institute of Technology and was subsequently supported as an NIH- and CMAD-Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University. Prior to joining the DOE in 2021, Dr. Roizen led an NIH-funded laboratory in the Department of Chemistry at Duke University. Her research laboratory pioneered radical-mediated sulfamate ester- and sulfamide-guided C-H functionalization methods, including photo- and electrochemically-driven approaches. Duke University recognized the high quality of her mentoring strategies with a 2020 Dean’s Award for Excellence in Mentoring. |
| | | | The ACS Green Chemistry Institute’s 28th Annual Green Chemistry & Engineering Conference (GC&E) will be held June 3-5, 2024, in Atlanta, Georgia. The event will include dynamic sessions, hands-on workshops, collaborative activities, and thought-provoking panel discussions. |
| | | | FY 2023 RBI Activities and Engagement Report |
| Fiscal year (FY) 2023 was a year of record achievements for the Renewable Bioproducts Institute (RBI). RBI is a community of people who are committed to cutting-edge research, education, and public outreach in renewable bioproducts. This includes our phenomenal staff, expert research scientists and engineers, talented graduate students, and internationally recognized faculty from schools across Georgia Tech. Enjoy perusing the report and reflect on our community's accomplishments. |
| | | | RBI Testing Services include chemical analysis; corrosion; microscopy; paper, board and box testing; pulp analysis and recovery. The research services team was created to oversee all activities related to research services for both internal and external customers.
The multidisciplinary capabilities of the team make it uniquely qualified to address customers' technical needs in the areas of process and product development and quality control. Our professional scientists and engineers work together to provide information and offer solutions required by a rapidly changing market. Where appropriate, Research Services personnel will involve RBI faculty and other staff experts to arrive at the best possible solution. |
| | | In May 2014, IPST was renamed the Renewable Bioproducts Institute (RBI), and given an expanded scope of work and research. The move enabled the Institute to broaden its appeal to research investors seeking to unlock the potential of biomass materials for a range of products beyond just paper. |
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