(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.
