RBI Industrial Advisory Board (stock image)
The Renewable Bioproducts Institute (RBI) at Georgia Tech is excited to welcome three additions to its membership-based industrial advisory board: Pactiv Evergreen, Rayonier Advanced Materials, and Grasim Industries.
According to associate director Chris Luettgen, “these companies add to our board by providing expanded industrial expertise in laminated food packaging and dissolving pulp manufacturing.”
One of the companies joining recently is Pactiv Evergreen, a leading manufacturer of fresh food and beverage packaging in North America. Luettgen also facilitated the entry of RYAM (Rayonier Advanced Materials), who joined the advisory board in early spring semester 2022. RYAM produces high purity fluff and dissolving pulps for personal care and other products.
Finally, we welcome Grasim Industries, part of the India-based Aditya Birla Group of companies that also includes Novelis. Grasim is a leading producer of market and dissolving pulps as well as viscose and rayon. Grasim is joining the advisory board under a new trial membership program, which allows companies a 1-year period to experience the benefits of membership prior to making a longer-term commitment.
According to executive director Carson Meredith, “through this trial member program we hope to expand the range and breadth of participating companies.” RBI is excited to include these companies in guiding our research vision and programming. The full list of participating companies and member benefits can be found here: https://research.gatech.edu/rbi/members.
Partial mixer diagram
A team under Martha Grover, Elsa Reichmanis, and Carson Meredith recently published a paper in Chemistry of Materials titled "Composition Gradient High-Throughput Polymer Libraries Enabled by Passive Mixing and Elevated Temperature Operability." Grad student Aaron Liu (pictured) and Ezgi Dogan-Guner (Ph.D. 2021) are co-first authors, while RahulVenkatesh, Miguel Gonzalez, and Mike McBride (Ph.D. 2019) are also listed as co-authors.
ABSTRACT: The development of high-throughput experimentation (HTE) methods to efficiently screen multiparameter spaces is key to accelerating the discovery of high-performance multicomponent materials (e.g., polymer blends, colloids, etc.) for sensors, separations, energy, coatings, and other thin-film applications relevant to society. Although the generation and characterization of gradient thin-film library samples is a common approach to enable materials HTE, the ability to study many systems is impeded by the need to overcome unfavorable solubilities and viscosities among other processing challenges under ambient conditions. In this protocol, a solution coating system capable of operating temperatures over 110 degrees C is designed and demonstrated for the deposition of composition gradient polymer libraries. The system is equipped with a custom, solvent-resistant passive mixer module suitable for high-temperature mixing of polymer solutions at ambient pressure. Residence time distribution modeling was employed to predict the coating conditions necessary to generate composition gradient films using a poly(3-hexylthiophene) and poly(styrene) model system. Poly(propylene) and poly(styrene) blends were selected as a first demonstration of high-temperature gradient film coating: the blend represents a polymer system where gradient films are traditionally difficult to generate via existing coating approaches due to solubility constraints under ambient conditions. The methodology developed here is expected to widen the range of solution processed materials that can be explored via high-throughput laboratory sampling and provides an avenue for efficiently screening multiparameter materials spaces and/or populating the large data sets required to enable data-driven materials science.
The full paper can be found in July 14, 2022, Chemistry of Materials.
Georgia Tech will be closed in observance of the M.L.K, Jr. National Holiday.
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Last Monday in May. A day of remembering those who have died while serving in the U.S. Armed Forces, observed the last Monday in May. Campus is closed and classes will not meet.
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The Georgia Tech campus is closed for winter break.
Future vaccine delivery may rely on everyday items like BBQ lighters and microneedles, thanks to the ingenuity of a team of Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University researchers.
Carson Meredith standing outside in Finland with Georgia Tech Ph.D. students: Yue Ji (ChBE), Li Zhang (MSE), Nasreen Khan (ChBE), and Udita Ringania (ChBE).
This summer, a faculty and student group from the Renewable Bioproducts Institute (RBI) at Georgia Tech attended TAPPI’s International Conference on Nanotechnology for Renewable Materials (TAPPI Nano) in Helsinki, Finland from June 13-17. This is a leading conference that attracts professionals, researchers, and corporations conducting research or using nanotechnology focused on renewable materials.
On average, the event draws more than 400 academics, industry leaders, and researchers from more than 25 countries around the world. This year's event featured more than 100 technical presentations, four keynote speakers, end-user panels, and poster presentations. The conference is designed to help attendees gain insights into the latest advancements in research and actual application in today’s newest renewable material products.
“Nanotechnologies are now being used commercially in renewable products in the paper and pulp industries,” said Carson Meredith, executive director of RBI. “In that industry, nanomaterials are being used mainly as an additive—such as for corrugated packaging. They are finding that small amounts of these additives can reduce the amount of fiber needed. New additives can also be used to acquire unique combinations of properties such as higher strength with less weight or help to color paper white with more environmentally friendly methods..”
Nanotechnology in the renewable bioproducts industry is enabling large-scale financial savings and helping to conserve resources when making paper products according to Meredith who is also a professor and the James Harris Faculty Fellow in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering.
Georgia Tech faculty and student presenters listed in the conference agenda included:
Talks at TAPPI Nano2022
Posters at TAPPI Nano2022
Kyriaki Kalaitzidou is an assistant professor in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and strategic coordinator for circular materials for RBI. The four doctoral students presenting included Yue Ji, Nasreen Khan, and Udita Ringania from the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering; and Li Zhang from the School of Materials Science and Engineering.
TAPPI, formed in 1915, is the leading association for the worldwide pulp, paper, packaging, tissue, and converting industries.
Carson Meredith with Georgia Tech Ph.D. students: Yue Ji (ChBE), Li Zhang (MSE), Nasreen Khan (ChBE), and Udita Ringania (ChBE).
Walter Rich
Saad Bhamla is an assistant professor of biomolecular engineering at Georgia Tech.
Abstract: Although cellulose nanomaterials have promising properties and performance in a wide application space, one hinderance to their wide scale industrial application has been associated with their economics of dewatering and drying and the ability to redisperse them back into suspension without introducing agglomerates or lose of yield. The present work investigates the dewatering of aqueous suspensions of cellulose nanofibrils (CNFs) using ultrasound as a potentially low-cost, non-thermal, and scalable alternative to traditional heat-based drying methods such as spray drying. Specifically, we use vibrating mesh transducers to develop a direct-contact mode ultrasonic dewatering platform to remove water from CNF suspensions in a continuous manner. We demonstrate that the degree of dewatering is modulated by the number of transducers, their spatial configuration, and the flow rate of the CNF suspension. Water removal of up to 72 wt.% is achieved, corresponding to a final CNF concentration of 11 wt.% in 30 min using a two-transducer configuration. To evaluate the redispersibility of the dewatered CNF material, we use a microscopic analysis to quantify the morphology of the redispersed CNF suspension. By developing a custom software pipeline to automate image analysis, we compare the histograms of the dimensions of the redispersed dewatered fibrils with the original CNF samples and observe no significant difference, suggesting that no agglomeration is induced due to ultrasonic dewatering. We also perform SEM analysis to evaluate the nanoscale morphology of these fibrils showing a width range of 20 nm–4 um. We estimate that this ultrasound dewatering technique is also energy-efficient, consuming up to 36% less energy than the enthalpy of evaporation per kilogram of water. Together with the inexpensive cost of transducers ( $1), the potential for scaling up in parallel flow configurations, and excellent redispersion of the dewatered CNFs, our work offers a proof-of-concept of a sustainable CNF dewatering system, that addresses the shortcomings of existing techniques.
The complete published paper can be found in the May 24 issue of Cellulose.
Walter Rich