Upcycling food industry side streams into functional organic-inorganic hybrid materials

Research question 

This project is all about finding better ways to use leftovers from the food industry. Instead of throwing them away, we want to turn them into new materials that we can use in place of things made from oil. Our emphasis is to discover how to combine organic and inorganic components into high-performance materials in a way that is good for the environment. A broad array of processing, synthesis and characterization techniques are considered in this project, including wet chemistry techniques such as extraction and fractionation of food industry side stream biomass, covalent and non-covalent synthesis and modification of the natural polymers, and microfluidic and extrusion processing of new hybrid materials from the organic and inorganic building blocks. Characterization techniques include thermal, mechanical, surface, morphological and chemical characterization with spectroscopic and gravimetric methods (TGA, DSC, FTIR, NMR, SEM, TEM, AFM, Instron, contact angle meter, etc.).  

 Sustainability aspects

This project fits in with several United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals devoted to making the world a better place, like innovation towards a greener industry, using less water and being more responsible about what we consume.