Feb 22 2011
According to Professor James Clark, Director of Green Chemistry Centre of Excellence at the University of York, the utilization of green chemical technologies that cause minimum environmental infringement will assist in finding products that are authentically green and renewable.
He is planning to deliver a lecture on the subject in a seminar to be held at the yearly meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). The new green chemical technologies are anticipated to play a crucial role to assist the society in the removal of waste while providing a range of commodities from the biorefineries.
According to the Professor, the process of removing vital chemicals from biomass will help in setting up of a number of biorefineries in future. He said that the university has earlier revealed that wax products with a number of usages can be derived from crop and other spin-offs such as straws of barley and wheat, residues of timber and grasses by utilizing supercritical carbon dioxide, a product of the green chemical technology that enables the manufacture of products without solvent residuals. The distilled residues can be utilized in a number of usages in bio-processing as well as in construction.
The low level temperature microwaves can be deployed in the pyrolysis process of the biomass thus enabling increased level of control during the heating applications. Such a procedure allows greater level of energy conservation and helps in the production of high quality oils and oils and solid products with valuable chemical attributes.
According to Professor Clark, the mixing of continuous extraction with that of microwave radiation will cleanse the sediments thus making the oils less acidic and cleaner with low level of alkali metal contamination. The produced oils can be used as feedstock for manufacturing chemical products and as a blending mix for transport fuels.
Source: http://www.york.ac.uk/