Tag: featured

Congratulations to Robert McNair for his recent award on commercialisation of research. He recently took part in a Commercialisation of Research (CoRe) course, which is undertaken by 3rd year students on the Graphene NOWNANO CDT course (UoM). The course aimed to educate students on the business and enterprise side of academic research. Across the 12 week course, topics were covered such as, marketing and market research, starting a business, intellectual property (IP) and preparing pitches to investors. As part of the course, Rob was awarded a cash prize for the Best Marketing Assessment. This involved creating a relevant enterprise, identifying customers, researching competitors and creating a product with key differentiators to existing technologies. Rob’s enterprise, SolarPure, was focused on generating clean water using renewable resources (solar energy), specifically targeting developing countries. The course was extremely useful and gave all participants a good insight into the rewards and challenges of commercializing research!

Check out our new article on process intensification via continuous and simultaneous isolation of antioxidants as an upcycling approach for olive leaf waste featured on the front cover of the ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering journal by ACS. The work was done in collaboration with Prof Drioli from ITM-CNR, and Dr Fonte from Manchester.

For the illustration the credit goes to Xavier Pita scientific illustrator at KAUST.

Edited by Andrew Livingston and Gyorgy Szekely, the book titled Sustainable Nanoscale Engineering: From Materials Design to Chemical Processing has recently been published. The book presents the latest on the design of nanoscale materials and their applications in sustainable chemical production processes. The newest achievements of materials science, in particular nanomaterials, opened new opportunities for chemical engineers to design more efficient, safe, compact and environmentally benign processes.

Our recent partnership between The University of Manchester, Khalifa University of Science and Technology, and King Abdullah University of Science and Technology have developed graphene-based membranes to take salts out of water. Read the news piece by clicking here.

Congratulations to Levente Cseri for his Best Poster Award at the PERMEA 2019 conference. Levente gave a talk titled “Boosting the permselectivity: GO nanocomposite anion exchange membranes for electrodialysis” (read more here) and presented a poster on “Organic solvent nanofiltration for sustainable organocatalysis”.

Join us at the PERMEA 2019 – Membrane Conference of Visegrad Countries, which will be held from August 26-29, 2019 in Budapest, Hungary. The keynote lecture on ‘Toward Sustainable Organic Solvent Nanofiltration Membranes & Processes’ will cover our research at UoM and KAUST on the potential of biophenols, bamboo fibers, interpenetrating polymer networks and ion-stabilization for achieving high-performance nanofiltration membranes. You can read more about some of these published works in ACS Applied Polymer Materials, ACS Applied Nano Materials, ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering and ACS Nano.

Congratulations to Hai Anh Le Phuong and Levente Cseri for their European Membrane Society Travel Awards! The European Membrane Society provided three awards for PhD students to support their travel to the PERMEA 2019 conference. Out of the three, two were awarded to members of the Szekely Group as a result of successful applications by Hai Anh and Levente. Hai Anh is set to give an oral presentation entitled “Nature-inspired membrane supports for organic solvent nanofiltration” (read more here) while also presenting a poster on “Bio-inspired membranes for improved performance and solvent resistance”. Levente will give a talk titled “Boosting the permselectivity: GO nanocomposite anion exchange membranes for electrodialysis” (read more here) and present a poster on “Organic solvent nanofiltration for sustainable organocatalysis”.