Events

February 28, 2025 at 10:00 AM

Symone Alexander

Auburn University

Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering

Colburn 366
University of Delaware | Newark, DE

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Valorization and Regeneration of Cellulose Sourced from Restaurant Food Waste

The Alexander Research Team uses nature as inspiration for everything we do – from reverse engineering biological systems for engineering design to using self-assembly and structural hierarchy to access new material properties. Biopolymers like cellulose are found naturally and abundantly in plants. However, the shift to utilize biopolymers to reduce the environmental impact of materials has revealed significant challenges in valorization, characterization, and processing due to their structural complexity. The goal of this work is to design sustainable, environmentally friendly platforms to extract biopolymers from real-world, mixed food and agricultural waste and introduce new techniques for regeneration of porous cellulose materials. We show that mixed, uncontrolled food waste from a restaurant can be reproducibly converted into cellulose using a process that results in waste streams that can be poured down the drain. From the materials design perspective, we show that the 3-D regeneration of cellulose can be easily controlled by tuning cellulose solution behavior. This drastically reduces the variability in mechanical properties and small molecule transport of porous cellulose materials and enables their translation into to new technology.