To recover a freshly made pharmaceutical from its liquid reaction mixture, the mixture is often boiled, requiring a lot of energy. But what if we could recover such a drug using a simple filter? And how do we select a good filter for the wide range of solvents and drugs used and produced? In our recent article, we show that...
Purifying butanol thus requires a huge amount of energy. Scientists, however, developed new materials that work like a sponge. They are capable to adsorb butanol selectively from that soup of waste and bacteria. Results are promising, but the process to remove butanol out of these sponges can still be improved.
In too high concentrations, biobutanol is toxic for our clostridial bacteria. At the end of the process, you have a mixture of bacteria, waste, and butanol. But how do you recover this butanol? To do this, you can boil the mixture very hard, which requires a lot of energy. Developing alternatives is part of my research.
Your keyboard, the steering wheel of your car, the tires of your bicycle ... Nowadays, we produce all our chemical resources for plastics from fossil oil and natural gas. These sources are non-renewable and their exploitation has a large environmental impact. But an alternative exists. Scientists discovered bacteria capable of converting green...