(633a) Conversion of Biowaste to Value-Added Biochemicals and Functional Biomaterials for High-Efficient Circular Economy

Our society is facing long-term environmental challenges such as extreme climate change, resource and energy depletion, air pollution, food scarcity, water and soil contaminations. To tackle these environmental and sustainable concerns and challenges, our study focuses on the use of green chemistry and engineering technique to produce value-added bioproducts including platform chemicals, functional biomaterials, and biofuels from abundant renewable resources, especially low-cost waste. In this talk, the major research areas in four aspects will be introduced at first: 1) Fabrication of functional nanomaterials for mitigating water, soil, food contaminants; 2) Synthesis of chemical building blocks & monomer precursors for sustainable polymer systems; 3) Catalytic conversion of lignin to high value aromatic platform chemicals and hydrocarbon fuel precursors; and 4) Sustainable process modeling and optimization. This talk will present the overall studies on the development of a wide range of value added bioproducts in the applications of food safety, medical, environmental applications. The key problems during the self-assembling, molecular synthesis, and catalytical valorization will be also elucidated by several recent works.