Projects
Here are some of the exciting projects running in our lab !
1. Designing poly(ionic liquid)-based engineered membranes for CO2 purification
Chemists and chemical engineers design chemical products and processes that serve the needs and wishes of society. Every decision in this design activity must be in accordance with laws concerning health and the environmental, which basically promote the principles of Green Chemistry. The adequate development of strategies revealed that it can be cheaper and even profitable to meet Green Chemistry goals. Higher efficiency, less waste, better product quality, and reduced liability are some of the key words in this area.
The development of engineering applications based on ionic liquids is not a new topic. Quickly researchers found out that some properties of ILs enable more efficient and greener processes, often leading to clever multiphase engineering with opportunities to recycle the IL working fluid within the process. Despite these clear advantages, most ILs are more difficult and more costly to prepare than molecular solvents. Moreover, some IL structures can exhibit problematic toxicity and ecotoxicity properties. Thus, ILs are not intrinsically green. Recently, a great effort has been put in the development of biodegradable and low toxicity ILs and many new ions have been added to the IL´s tool box. An alternative approach to making ILs with discrete anions is to produce eutectic mixtures of salts and hydrogen bond donors. These compounds, referred to as Deep Eutectic Solvents (DES), are a new type of ILs which combines the interesting features characteristic of ionic liquids and can be prepared in a cheaper and easier way than conventional ILs, from nature derived, environmentally friendly and cheap compounds.
We are very much interested in studying DES and their ILs analogues and understnad how they behave in aqueous and organic solutions. Finally, we want to develope new extraction processes based on these benigne compounds.
In these last decades, aqueous biphasic systems (ABS), based on two polymers or a polymer and a salt, have been described as a successful non-chromatographic alternative for the isolation and purification of a large number of biomolecules, from simple proteins, amino acids, enzymes, cells, antibodies and other bioproducts. ABS have been shown to be an high selectivity and biocompatibility technique, that can be easily scale-up and used in continuous operation mode. In addition, it decreases energy consumption, reduces waste and minimizes costs due to a fewer steps of unit operation.
On the other hand, Ionic Liquids (ILs) are advanced and highly performant solvents, with unique properties such as no vapor pressure and tunable solvation ability, that have been largely exploited. Soon researchers realized the enormous potential of ILs in separation technologies and, in particular, in the implementation of ABS, where these versatile solvents combined with not only salts and polymers, but also with carbohydrates and aminoacids, provide interesting schemes for the separation of although diverse, still relatively simple solutes.
Inspired by the recent breakthrough in the use of IL-based ABS for the separation of a wide diversity of solutes, including biomolecules such as proteins, we want to explore the use IL-based ABS based on biocompatible ILs, synthesized from cheap, nontoxic, biodegradable compounds, namely vitamins, aminoacids and carbohydrates, to separate in an efficient, clean and cheap way, in health and biomass related problems
