Seminar

ABSTRACT: The increasing demand, cost escalation and environmental impact of raw materials for industrial chemicals, materials, and energy production impel the development of sustainable strategies for resource utilization. Such sustainable resource demand spurred investigation for the utilization of agricultural and forestry wastes and by-products. The emergence of bovine spongiform encephalopathy reduced most of the traditional uses of rendered animal meals such as blood meal, meat, and bone meal as animal feed, effectively making it an industrial waste.

ABSTRACT:  The current drug development process is both very slow (15 year average) and costly ($1.5B/drug average). Despite this hefty investment, inefficiencies in the drug screening process routinely result in the withdrawal of drugs from the market due to serious toxicities and adverse cardiovascular effects. Safety screen assessments performed on cell cultures and animal models do not always correlate with clinical risk.

ABSTRACT:  Truly rational design has been a major goal of bioengineering for some time. And while certain aspects of genetic engineering have become more predictable, the need for information about cellular behaviour has only continued to grow. The availability of genomic, transcriptomic, and metabolomic data has opened the door to the synthesis of multiple levels of information in biological research.

ABSTRACT:  While we have isolated and regenerated celluloses for textile applications since the turn of the century (e.g. viscose), nature continues to offer new insights into how we could reintegrate biodiversity and heterogeneity into cellulose-based materials as a means of modulating its physico-chemical properties. Cellulose is one of the most abundant organic polymers on earth and serves as an important structural component of the cell walls of plants.

ABSTRACT:   Polymeric materials are ubiquitous in the modern world, finding use in everything from coffee cups to truck beds to drug-eluting stents and carbon-fiber reinforced aircraft components. As our demands of these materials increase, the need for improved properties, added functionality and advanced manufacturing processes grows, and the elucidation and application of key composition-structure-processing-properties relations becomes increasingly critical.

The transportation system is a major source of emissions of carbon dioxide.  Fuel cell vehicles operating on renewable generated hydrogen is one of ways to remove carbon from the transportation system.  The main barriers for adoption of this technology is cost and hydrogen infrastructure.  The life cost of fuel-cell systems can be addressed by making the fuel cell more durable.  Specific challenges for fuel cell development are examined.

ABSTRACT:  Human civilization has been driven by harvest and utilization of solar energy.  Developing better technologies leading to more effective energy harvest and utilization is being emerged as one of the most essential research themes.  In this presentation, two topics, energy storage and protein therapeutics, will be covered.  The first topic will focus on design and fabrication of electrochemical devices such as supercapacitors, batteries, and fuel cells.  Recognize that living organisms are made from basic elements (e.g., C, O, H, N and P), consume energy and repro

ABSTRACT:  Microalgae have received a great deal of attention as a platform for biofuel production due to their photosynthetic nature. However, the over emphasis on the production of lipids for biodiesel synthesis can limit the productivity of algae cultures and undervalues the potential applications for the significant quantities of protein and carbohydrate fractions present in this biomass. Currently, the commercial prospects for microalgae biofuels are primarily inhibited by their low cell densities and the high cost of current lipid extraction processes.

ABSTRACT: In this work, the issue of stability for two-phase incompressible flow in homogeneous porous media out of the Darcy regime (i.e. when inertia must be taken into account) is considered. The development is based on a macroscopic model derived by upscaling the pore-scale Navier-Stokes equations, assuming that the inertial correction is quadratic in the filtration velocity, as widely admitted with the classical Darcy-Forchheimer model.