Publications associées à Bioconversion of pentose sugars to value added chemicals and fuels: Recent trends, challenges and possibilities

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

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

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

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

Autocatalysis and CO2: Carbon Capture and Utilization (CCU) Meets Natural Processes

Paul Joseph Dyson, Martin Hulla, Jorge Gustavo Uranga, Gabriela Gastelu

Autocatalytic reactions were proposed to play a key role at the beginning of life starting from the first reduction of CO2 to formate, acetate and C-1-C-4 hydrocarbons. In carbon capture and utilization (CCU) processes, the same reactions were demonstrated ...

Wiley-VCH Verlag2023

cgNA+: A sequence-dependent coarse-grain model of double-stranded nucleic acids

Rahul Sharma

DNA mechanics plays a crucial role in many biological processes, including nucleosome positioning and protein-DNA interactions. It is believed that nature employs epigenetic modifications in DNA to further regulate gene expression. Moreover, double-strande ...

EPFL2023

Addressing chemical pollution in biodiversity research

Kristin Schirmer, Colette vom Berg, Ahmed Tlili

Climate change, biodiversity loss, and chemical pollution are planetary-scale emergencies requiring urgent mitigation actions. As these "triple crises" are deeply interlinked, they need to be tackled in an integrative manner. However, while climate change ...

WILEY2023

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

Comparative Exergy and Economic Assessment of Fossil and Biomass-Based Routes for Ammonia Production

François Maréchal, Daniel Alexander Florez Orrego

Due to the increasing concerns about the marked dependence on fossil resources and their intrinsic economic uncertainty, as well as motivated by more stringent environmental regulations, the pursuit of alternative energy resources for the synthetic fertili ...

Silesian University of Technology2023

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

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

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

Well-Defined Copper-Based Nanocatalysts for Selective Electrochemical Reduction of CO2 to Ethylene and Ethanol

Raffaella Buonsanti, Ludovic Emile Frédy Zaza, Kevin Rossi

The electrochemical CO2 reduction reaction (CO2RR) holds the promise to revolutionize the chemical industry by producing value-added chemicals and fuels from CO2 and water while storing renewable energy. However, catalyst design still remains one of the ma ...

2022

Hydro-processing of biomass using novel metal-organic framework (MOF)/polymer composite catalysts

Vikram Vinayak Karve

Generating value, in the form of functional chemicals, from biomass is a critical need of today. It is expected that replacing petroleum with biomass as the source of many commodity and fine chemicals can lead the transition away from a fossil-fuel based e ...

EPFL2022

Active sites on copper-based catalysts for electrochemical CO2 reduction selectively to C2+ products

Jie Zhang

Electrochemical CO2 reduction (eCO2RR) towards value-added chemicals, powered by renewable electricity, is a promising technology for storing the intermittent renewable energy in the form of chemical bonds. Among the various products of eCO2RR, multi-carbo ...

EPFL2022

Model-based scale-up of a continuously operated consolidated bioprocess based on a microbial consortium for the production of ethanol

David Beat Dempfle

This work demonstrated that consolidated bioprocessing is a promising concept for conversion of lignocellulose to ethanol at industrial scale. CBP offers great cost saving potential, is feasible to be operated continuously and may be scaled up due to exten ...

EPFL2022

Developing structure-oriented models for enzymatic hydrolysis of lignocellulosic biomass

Jessica Charlène Rohrbach

With the unsustainable use of fossil fuels increasing strains on human institutions and ecosystems, the development of a renewable energy alternative is of paramount importance. Second generation biorefineries, based on the production of fuels and chemical ...

EPFL2021