Publications related to Organic Solvent Effects in Biomass Conversion Reactions

Development of Sustainable Carbohydrate-Based Solvents by Acetal Functionalisation of Biomass

Organic solvents are ubiquitous in industrial and domestic applications from the production of pharmaceuticals to household consumer products. The negative impact of most traditional solvents, especially aprotic types, on the environment, health, and safet ...

EPFL2024

Estrogenic, Genotoxic, and Antibacterial Effects of Chemicals from Cryogenically Milled Tire Tread

Florian Frédéric Vincent Breider, Kristin Schirmer, Benoît Jean Dominique Ferrari, Thibault Béranger Masset

Tire and road wear particles (TRWP) contain complex mixtures of chemicals and release them to the environment,and potential toxic effects of these chemicals still need to be characterized. We used a standardized surrogate for TRWP,cryogenically milled tire ...

2024

First-principles thermodynamics of precipitation in aluminum-containing refractory alloys

Anirudh Raju Natarajan

Materials for high -temperature environments are actively being investigated for deployment in aerospace and nuclear applications. This study uses computational approaches to unravel the crystallography and thermodynamics of a promising class of refractory ...

Pergamon-Elsevier Science Ltd2024

Design and Synthesis of Bio-based Amphiphiles from Lignocellulosic Biomass

Songlan Sun

In the pursuit of a carbon-neutral chemical industry, minimizing fossil feedstock consumption while integrating renewable carbon sources is imperative. Surfactants, inherently amphiphilic, pose challenges in separation and recovery processes. Given their e ...

EPFL2024

New Polymers from Biomass-Derived Hydroxycinnamic Acid Derivatives

Ghezae Tekleab

Polymers play a central role in shaping our world across various fields, but their heavy reliance on petrochemicals poses climate change, environmental and health risks. To address and alleviate these issues, transitioning to sustainable polymers, sourced ...

EPFL2024

Decarbonizing the fertilizers sector: an alternative pathway for urea and nitric acid production

François Maréchal, Daniel Alexander Florez Orrego, Meire Ellen Gorete Ribeiro Domingos

In order to alleviate the environmental impact that nitrogen fertilizers production is responsible for, several efforts have been addressed to incentivize the partial or total decarbonization of the supply chains of ammonia and its derivatives. The decarbo ...

2024

Lignin Hydrogenolysis: Phenolic Monomers from Lignin and Associated Phenolates across Plant Clades

Jeremy Luterbacher, Yuan Li

The chemical complexity of lignin remains a major challengeforlignin valorization into commodity and fine chemicals. A knowledgeof the lignin features that favor its valorization and which plantsproduce such lignins can be used in plant selection or to eng ...

AMER CHEMICAL SOC2023

Investigation of Biomass Hydrothermal Conversion Products by HRMS

Daniil Salionov

The dependency on fossil fuels and their impact on the environment is a matter of great concern for the future sustainability of modern society. The development of the "green" technologies which utilize renewable energy sources is now under investigation. ...

EPFL2023

Biomass to energy: a machine learning model for optimum gasification pathways

Berend Smit, Kevin Maik Jablonka, Susana Garcia Lopez

Biomass is a highly versatile renewable resource for decarbonizing energy systems. Gasification is a promising conversion technology that can transform biomass into multiple energy carriers to produce heat, electricity, biofuels, or chemicals. At present, ...

Royal Soc Chemistry2023

Integrated production of urea and nitric acid in the pulp industry: techno-economic and environmental analysis of black liquor gasification-based processes

François Maréchal, Shivom Sharma, Daniel Alexander Florez Orrego, Meire Ellen Gorete Ribeiro Domingos

The pursuit of alternative energy sources for the nitrogen fertilizers sector has recently earned renewed interest due to increasing concerns regarding the world dependence on non-renewable energy resources and also motivated by the more stringent environm ...

2022

An Overview of Heterogeneous Catalysts Based on Hypercrosslinked Polystyrene for the Synthesis and Transformation of Platform Chemicals Derived from Biomass

Lioubov Kiwi

Platform chemicals, also known as chemical building blocks, are substances that serve as starting materials for the synthesis of various value-added products, which find a wide range of applications. These chemicals are the key ingredients for many fine an ...

MDPI2023

Direct conversion of lignin to functionalized diaryl ethers via oxidative cross-coupling

Paul Joseph Dyson, Mingyang Liu

Efficient valorization of lignin, a sustainable source of functionalized aromatic products, would reduce dependence on fossil-derived feedstocks. Oxidative depolymerization is frequently applied to lignin to generate phenolic mono- mers. However, due to th ...

Nature Research2023

Decision support for the design of integrated biorefineries

Julia Granacher

A shift from fossil-based energy and products to more sustainable alternatives is essential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and associated climate change impacts. Biomass represents a promising alternative for providing fuels and carbon-based products w ...

EPFL2023

First-Principles Thermodynamics of CsSnI3

Nicola Marzari, Lorenzo Monacelli

CsSnI3 is a promising ecofriendly solution for energy harvesting technologies. It exists at room temperature in either a black perovskite polymorph or a yellow 1D double-chain, which irreversibly deteriorates in the air. In this work, we unveil the relativ ...

AMER CHEMICAL SOC2023

Comparative techno-economic and energy analyses of integrated biorefinery processes of furfural and 5-hydroxymethylfurfural from biomass residue

François Maréchal

For efficient feedstock and energy utilization, integrated biorefinery processes are applied to furfural production from bagasse to convert furfural residue into 5-hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF)-an important intermediate building block for the production of v ...

PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD2023

Lignin, from biomass waste to sustainable materials for food packaging, antiviral coatings and agriculture

Alice Boarino

Our planet has been challenged for years by our reckless use of fossil fuels, which has led to the ongoing climate change and energy crisis. The transition to the use of renewable alternative sources has now became urgent and inevitable. The valorization o ...

EPFL2023

Comparison of regression techniques for generating surrogate models to predict the thermodynamic behavior of biomass gasification systems

François Maréchal, Daniel Alexander Florez Orrego, Julia Granacher, Meire Ellen Gorete Ribeiro Domingos

Biomass resources can play an important role in the energy transition, being a dynamic feedstock that can be transformed either into solid, liquid or gaseous fuels. The biomass gasification is a versatile way to convert wastes into energy. In this work, th ...

Elsevier2023

Advances in hydration and thermodynamics of cementitious systems

Patrick Juilland, Karen Scrivener, Aslam Kunhi Mohamed, Thomas Matschei, Fabien Jacques Michel Georget

Optimising the hydration of cementitious materials is crucial to leverage their full potential and avoid wasting resources, embodied energy and CO2. Understanding the fundamental mechanisms is key to reach these objectives. In this paper, we review progres ...

Pergamon-Elsevier Science Ltd2023

Process modeling and integration of hydrogen and synthetic natural gas production in a kraft pulp mill via black liquor gasification

François Maréchal, Daniel Alexander Florez Orrego, Meire Ellen Gorete Ribeiro Domingos

The black liquor gasification integrated to chemical plants has shown potential for reducing the process irreversibility and promoting the decarbonization of this industrial sector. In the integrated chemical plants proposed in this work, the purpose is co ...

Pergamon-Elsevier Science Ltd2023

Tuning the reactivity of uranium towards small molecules in multimetallic complexes

Nadir Jori

One of the main goals of organometallic chemistry in the last decades was the activation of small molecule in mild reaction conditions. Even though multiple examples of catalytic cycles able to produce fine chemicals from cheap and abundant sources using t ...

EPFL2023