Development of cost-effective and environmentally friendly technologies for the production of pharmaceuticals and biofuels

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Targeting on developing the cost-effective and environmentally friendly technologies for the production of important pharmaceuticals and bioethanol, I propose two projects for this NSERC Discovery Program as a continuation of my previous research work. Project 1 is the mechanistic study of enantioselective crystallization for the resolution of racemic mixtures. Project 2 is the modeling and multi-objective optimization of simultaneous saccharification and fermentation for bioethanol from lignocellulosic biomass. Enantioselective crystallization is a powerful technique in obtaining the enantiomeric pure chemicals. To design and operate such an enantioslective crystallization process for desired separation is a challenging task. The potential difficulties are: a) the demand for a large quantity of solid/liquid equilibrium data; b) the presence of two competing crystal species; c) the existence of polymorphism in solid crystallines; and d) the lack of an efficient model-based optimization and control strategy. This proposed project addresses all these gaps and aims to develop a robust design and optimization strategy so that therapeutically active single enantiomers with stable crystalline forms can be obtained by direct crystallization. Simultaneous saccharification and fermentation (SSF), which combines enzymatic hydrolysis with ethanol fermentation has been widely used in lingocellulosic biomass refinery. But the different temperature optima for hydrolysis and fermentation as well as the complicated effects of the many other operating parameters limit the production capacity of the SSF process. Systematic modeling and multi-objective optimization of the SSF process will be carried out in this project to reduce its operation costs and increase overall ethanol yield. The proposed research endeavors to provide rational design and optimization strategies for different chemical and biochemical processes as well as to clarify the underlying theories associated with these strategies. This will provide useful information for industry and will have an active impact on the rapid commercialization of new value-added products.