Dr Jason Hallett from the Department of Chemical Engineering won the Royal Society Translation Award to scale-up his research on ionic liquids.
Congratulations to Dr Jason Hallett and his team, Dr Agnieszka Brandt-Talbot and Florence Gschwend, on winning the Royal Society Translation Award!
The Royal Society Translation Award, which is awarded twice a year, aims to help scientists investigate the potential to commercialise their research. Apart from the £50,000 prize, it also includes a training and support package to make the best use of the award.
Dr Jason Hallett won the Translation Award for his research on ionic liquids, which can be used to pre-treat lignocellulosic biomass. The technology, named ionoSolv, is available for licensing in Imperial Innovations.
About ionoSolv
The ionoSolv technology, which is developed by Chrysalix Technologies (a spin-out company founded by Dr Jason Hallett, Dr Agnieszka Brandt-Talbot and Florence Gschwend) along with Imperial Innovations, solves two problems at the same time: hazardous waste treatment and biofuel generation. The process takes in construction wood: this material – sometimes referred to as greenwood – is treated with metals (copper, chromium, arsenic) to preserve it from rotting away during use. However, once it is no longer needed, construction wood usually ends up in a landfill site, as hazardous wood waste recycling is even more expensive, unless it is incinerated in specialist boilers which are not available in the UK. The innovative ionoSolv process uses ionic liquids as solvents to remove the metals from the wood while separating the wood itself into different components. The metals can even be recovered from the solvent and reused.
Previously, these challenges were tackled separately, but the new ionoSolv process solves both of them simultaneously: it recycles waste while generating useful products for cheaper.
– Dr Jason Hallett
Reader in Sustainable Chemical Technology
Furthermore, one of the wood fractions (cellulose) can be used to make paper or can be turned into biofuels, while the other fractions can also be used as source of energy, fuels or versatile chemicals. This solves the usual “food versus fuel” debate: many claim that by producing biofuels from food crops, the food prices will increase.
The £50,000 Royal Society Translation Award will be used for scale-up trials: Dr Jason Hallett and the other members of the commercialisation team will take the next step in the commercialisation, scaling up the experiments from the lab scale (10 mL) to the pilot plant scale (500 L).
[Article written by Dora Olah an Undergraduate student in the Department of Chemical Engineering.]
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