Foto del docente

Leonardo Setti

Assistant professor

Department of Industrial Chemistry "Toso Montanari"

Academic discipline: CHEM-07/C Chemistry and Biotechnology of Fermentation

Research

Keywords: bioelectronic polymers agro-food wastes biorefining biofuel cells Local Solar Community polymeric bioelectronics plastic photovoltaic devices Integrated Energy Management System

(updated April 2017)

The topics are based on two strategical and integrated approaches for biorefining focalised to the production of fine-chemicals and bioenergy from agro-food industrial wastes.

The first approach is on the biotransformation of biomasses from agro-food wastes: 1. application of specific enzymes for the biotransformation of plant cell wal; 2. recovery of chemical building blocks using refining techniques; 3. improvement of the efficiency in the energetic recovery from the biomasses by fermentation process such as alcholic and methanogenic.

The second approach is instead linked to the polymeric electronic and bioelectronic for the development of new plastic electronic devices for the production of energy: 1. development of new bioelectrodes fabricated by inkjet microdeposition techniques; 2. realization of plastic multifunctional biofuel cells; 3. realization of plastiv photovoltaic devices.

Further line of research concerns the study of Energy Management Integrated Systems like a new models focused to the energy saving and renewable energies. These models are mainly oriented to the monitoring of the consuptions for the development of Local Energy Plans.



(updated April 2017)

Agro-food industry represents one of the most important sector at an european level and worldwide as well. FAO's reports permitts to estrapolate a worlwide volume of wastes from this sector in about 8 billion ton/year in which 3 billion ton/year are polysaccharides and 80 million ton/year are phytochemicals. Beyond petroleum, human should substitute 300-400 million ton/year from petroleum derivatives, destinated to the fabrication of materials as well as to the energy production in larger amount, thorough the use of biomass. On the basis the management of the agro-food wastes can constitute an important challenge for using this strategic resource in the next thirty years. Biorefining of the agro-food wastes for the production of secondary chemical building blocks: 1. application of specific enzymes such as amylases, pectinases, cellulases, xylanases, arabinoxylases, arylesterases,...which are produced by fungi, risults a good strategy to hydrolize the plant cell walls, constituted essentially by polysaccharides and proteins, which represents the most material into the agro-food waste. This action releases simple sugars and aminoacids to be fermented as well as phytocompounds such as chemical building blocks; 2. the recovery of chemical building blocks through techniques of refining is scoped to realize systems for accumulate compounds to be destinated both to direct consuming such as bioactive compounds (nutraceutics or cosmeceutics) and to fine-chemical applications such as intermediates in the chemical/biological synthesis of new chemicals; 3. the recovery of phytocompounds permitts an improvement of the efficiency in the energetic recovery from the biomasses focused on the production of bioethanol e biogas trough fermentation processes. Polytronics (electronic polymer) and biopolytronics (bioelectronic polymer) for the realization of plastic electronic devices such as new bioelectrodes realized through inkjet microdeposition techniques using electronic inks and biological inks which permits to fabricate micro-printed biocircuits on thin plastic surfaces by a computer assisted design.

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