Translational Technologies, Session 1: The Energy-Water Nexus
Session Leader: Dr. Katherine (KT) Moortgat, Mohr Davidow Ventures
Presentations:
Dr. Robert L. Burk, Ph.D. - Chief Scientific Officer, NanoH2O, Inc.
Leveraging Nanotechnology for Reverse Osmosis Membranes
NanoH2O enhances current polymer-based membranes with nanostructured material that allows additional control of key membrane properties. The result is a wide array of advantageous membrane characteristics including improved productivity and anti-fouling characteristics, while maintaining requisite salt rejection. NanoH2O advanced Thin-film Nanocomposite (TFN) membrane technology developed at UCLA, by leveraging existing membrane synthesis techniques. TFN membranes require few modifications to existing commercial manufacturing facilities and fit within current desalination pressure vessels without alteration.
(Thin-film Nanocomposite (TFN) Membranes, liscenced by NanoH2O, Inc.)
Dina Lozofsky - VP, Strategic Asset Management, Solarmer Energy, Inc.
Challenges of Transforming a Research Product into a Commercial Product
Organic Photovoltaics (OPV) have the capability to transform the solar cell industry because they are translucent, flexible, light weight, attractive and colorful, creating new solutions for power needs that cannot be solved with conventional silicon solar cell technology. This new technology is also focused on addressing the most important issue with earlier solar cell technologies - high manufacturing and materials costs. A portfolio of OPV device and materials technologies were developed in the Yang Yang Lab and licensed to Solarmer Energy, however, this is just the first step in getting the technology to market. Many other technologies and processes, such as scaling up to full size, encapsulation, manufacturing processes and product development, must be developed and/or acquired to transform this important research product into a commercial product.
(Organic Photovoltaic Devices and Materials, licensed by Solarmer Energy, Inc.)
Professor James C. Liao - UCLA Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
Fuels and Chemicals beyond Petroleum
Compared to the traditional biofuel, ethanol, higher alcohols offer advantages as gasoline substitutes because of their higher energy density and lower hygroscopicity. In addition, branched-chain alcohols have higher octane numbers compared to their straight-chain counterparts. However, these alcohols cannot be synthesized economically using native organisms. Here we present a metabolic engineering approach using Escherichia coli to produce higher alcohols including isobutanol, 1-butanol, 2-methyl-1-butanol, 3-methyl-1-butanol and 2-phenylethanol from a renewable carbon source, glucose. This strategy leverages the host’s highly active amino acid biosynthetic pathway and diverts its 2-keto acid intermediates for alcohol synthesis. In particular, we have achieved high yield, high specificity production of isobutanol from glucose. The strategy enables the exploration of biofuels beyond those naturally accumulated to high quantities in microbial fermentation.
(Synthesis of Higher Chain Alcohols, licensed by the Technology: Gevo, Inc)
Professor Yoram Cohen - Chemical and Bimolecular Engineering and Water Technology Research Center
Surface Nano-structuring with Polymers: A platform for the synthesis of high performance RO membranes and Chemical Sensors
A scalable platform technology for surface nano-structuring of polymeric and inorganic surfaces with terminally anchored macromolecules was developed. This technology is based on the use of atmospheric pressure plasma-induced graft polymerization (APPIGP) that enables the generation of a high surface density polymer brush layers that are covalently and terminally attached to the substrate surface. The chemical and physical features of the resulting grafted polymer film may be tuned to achieve unique architectures for effective advanced materials in membrane separations and chemical sensor applications. Using the APPIGP technology high response and robust selective polymer layers can be synthesized for use in chemical array-sensors. This same technology is also the basis for synthesis of a new class of high performance surface-nanostructured reverse osmosis (RO), nanofiltration (NF) and ultrafiltration (UF) membranes. The APIGP membranes are of low mineral scaling propensity and biofouling resistance and can be synthesized at a commercial scale.
(High Performance Surface Nano-Structured Membranes and Chemical sensing Layers, licensed by WaterStyle Holding Inc.)