Green and sustainable solvents for biocatalytic oxidations

The discovery that enzymes could function efficiently in organic solvents revolutionized their use in industry but represented a change from the natural “green” solvent, water, to a host of environmentally undesirable solvents. Considerable effort is being devoted to making such processes greener again. Bio-based solvents, derived from waste...

Graph neural networks for temperature-dependent activity coefficient prediction of solutes in ionic liquids

Ionic liquids (ILs) are important solvents for sustainable processes and predicting activity coefficients (ACs) of solutes in ILs is needed. Recently, matrix completion methods (MCMs), transformers, and graph neural networks (GNNs) have shown high accuracy in predicting ACs of binary mixtures, superior to well-established models, e.g., COSMO...

Solubilization and characterization of extracellular proteins from anammox granular sludge

Elucidating the extracellular polymeric substances (EPS) of anammox granular sludge is important for stable nitrogen removal processes in wastewater treatment. However, due to a lack of standardized methods for extraction and characterization, the composition of anammox granule EPS remains mostly unknown. In this study, alkaline (NaOH) and...

Molecular simulation of NH₃/ionic liquid mixtures for absorption heat pump cycles

Force Field based Monte Carlo (MC) simulations are conducted to predict the performance of an absorption heat pump cycle involving NH3/ionic liquid (IL) (refrigerant/absorbent) as working pair. To investigate the thermodynamic performance of the cycle, various properties such as the enthalpy of absorption, heat capacity, and solubility of...

Pilot plant study on the extractive distillation of toluene-methylcyclohexane mixtures using NMP and the ionic liquid [hmim][TCB] as solvents

The separation of the close-boiling point mixture: toluene - methylcyclohexane can be carried out by extractive distillation using the ionic liquid 1-hexyl-3-methylimidazolium tetracyanoborate ([hmim][TCB]), reported as promising solvent for the separation of this mixture. However, the polar nature of ionic liquids causes the formation of two...

Time-of-Flight Mass Spectrometric Analysis of Ionic Liquid Electrospray Emission: Effects of Liquid Constituents and Ion Transport on Emission of Binary Ionic Liquid Mixtures

Ionic liquid ions sources (ILIS) are under investigation for their application in micro-propulsion for small spacecraft as well as their potential bene?ts for mass spectrometry. Micro-fabricated ILIS based thrusters have been under investigation at the École Politechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,...