Projects

Fit-for-purpose cascaded-approach for water and resource recovery from food industry wastewaterFood industry produces large amounts of wastewater with significant contents of organic carbon, nutrients and added-value compounds at low concentrations that can be recovered following a cascaded approach based on a specifically designed sequence of technologies. However, the diversity and seasonality of industrial wastewater streams, i.e. in terms of composition, concentration, temperature, etc. ...

Model-based design of a biorefinery platform to valorise agrifood organic waste into odd-chain volatile fatty acids integrating technical and environmental criteria

The conversion of organic wastes by anaerobic fermentation (the so-called carboxylate platform) is one of the promising emerging biorefineries that allows valorising organic carbon to volatile fatty acids (VFA), which can be further processed as chemicals, biopolymers and biofuels. A major obstacle to the widespread of the carboxylate ...

Real-time smart monitoring of bioprocesses for efficient conversion of organic carbon to volatile fatty acids

Development of a lactic acid centred biorefinery scheme to valorize flexibly organic waste streams into biochemicals

The PETzyme project's objective is to develop an enzymatic technology for recycling polyethylene terephthalate (PET) wastes using free and immobilized PET hydrolases. We aim to obtain biocatalysts with enhanced thermostability, and we will take advantage of all recent works where protein engineering was used to improve the stability and catalytic efficiency of these enzymes, thus increasing the competitiveness of this recycling process.

In this proposal, we aim the sequential multivalorization of apple pomace towards the extraction of polyphenolics, the production of enzymes and its biological conversion into acetone-butanol-ethanol (ABE)

WooBAdh project aims to study the feasibility of replacing formaldehyde in wood adhesives by natural components derived from wood or other vegetable matter. The consortium will develop new bioadhesives which are able to provide a holistic solution to the current emissions challenges facing the wood-based composites industry. The proposed solution is focused on different modifications of polyphenols, namely lignin and tannins, for producing bioadhesives that do not contain formaldehyde in its ...

Valorization of mussel processing water into bioplastics