Biosorption in Effective Separation of Targeted Species from Multi-Component Systems

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Biosorption is a process that uses inexpensive non-living biomaterials to sequester chemical species of interest. It has attracted great interest particularly in regards to biosorbents made from industrial waste biomaterials, by-products, or cost-effective renewable materials. Biosorption has diverse applications in wastewater treatment, gas separation and purification, and chemical separation. The long-term goal of this biosorption research program is to develop innovative technologies to formulate and characterize biomaterial-based adsorbents as well as establish high-efficiency, low-cost adsorption processes for environmental, energy, chemical, pharmaceutical, and biomedical applications. As such, it addresses environmental and socio-economic needs.     During the past six years, significant progress has been made by the applicant's research group towards the above-stated research goal. Adsorbents were developed from barley straw to effectively adsorb emerging antibiotic pollutants levofloxacin and norfloxacin from simulated wastewater. In addition, a pressure swing adsorption (PSA) process was established using novel canola meal-based adsorbent particles to selectively remove water from butanol-water vapor mixtures and achieve biofuel butanol of high purity. However, the characteristics of biosorbents for treating extended emergent pharmaceutical pollutants need to be further determined. For example, carbamazepine (used to treat neuropathic pain and epilepsy) is one of the most commonly detected pharmaceutical pollutants in water bodies and cannot be effectively removed from water by current technologies. In addition, the stability of biosorbent pellets needs to be enhanced for purification of biofuel vapors or gases, along with greater understanding of the biosorption mechanisms.     In the next five years, the applicant will focus on the development of novel biosorption technologies with the two-fold benefit of reducing environmental impacts of various industrial processes while utilizing abundantly available agricultural residues such as canola straw, wheat straw, flax shives, and so on. The corresponding short-term objectives are to: 1) Formulate and characterize novel biosorbents for effectively removing the pharmaceutical pollutant carbamazepine from water. 2) Develop and characterize cost-effective novel biosorbent pellets with enhanced density, capacity, selectivity, stability, and reusability for adsorption of water vapor from the gas phase. 3) Establish and optimize the PSA process using the novel biosorbents from Objective 2 for drying bioalcohols and natural gas at reduced costs.     The research program will lead to innovative biosorption technologies for environmental and energy applications. It will contribute significantly to advancing knowledge of biosorption technology and biomaterial/material science and engineering. It will also provide training of 2 PhD, 2 MSc, and 10 undergraduate students in the field.