BioMADE Webinar Series — Empowering Biomanufacturing: Unlocking the Potential of Electrochemical Separations for Sustainable Downstream Processing

Join us Thursday, June 22 at 1pm CT, to hear from Professor Xiao Su, of the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Downstream processing is often a major bottleneck for bioindustrial manufacturing. Close to 50–70% of the overall production cost of organic acids and proteins comes from separation processes. For example, purification of succinic acid from fermentative production is a critical challenge for enabling its scalable bioproduction. Electrochemical separations can offer a sustainable and modular platform for innovating downstream processing, with applications in a range of organic acid, protein, and other biomolecule recovery.

In this webinar, we will introduce design principles for the development of new electrochemical separations tailored at advancing downstream processing for biomanufacturing. We will present our recent progress through our BioMADE project on developing energy-efficient, redox-based electrodialysis processes for organic acid purification. We will highlight the need for coupling molecular-level design of membranes with electrochemical engineering. Finally, we will provide a perspective towards new directions in the development of electrochemical separations, that can broaden their applicability for a range of bioproduct purification. In the long-term, the development of electrochemical purification technologies can accelerate process intensification, through reduction of the number of unit operations, the elimination of waste and solvent footprint, and integration with renewable electricity sources for decarbonization. Thus, we envision electrochemical separations playing a key role for the transition towards scalable, modular, and distributed biomanufacturing in the U.S. Learn more about this BioMADE project here.

This webinar is open to BioMADE members only.