Charging toward greener chemicals
Jean-Philippe Tessonnier shifts his office computer to show an illustration of a greener future that, over in the upper left, features a farmer driving a combine through a cornfield.
The illustration depicts that farmer’s harvest heading to the right to be processed by a fermentation plant powered by wind turbines and solar panels. The resulting fermentation broth of water, salts, yeast or bacteria (with the aroma of a yeasty wheat beer, Tessonnier said) moves to the middle of the illustration where an electrobiorefinery zaps it with a few volts of electricity.
That electricity is the catalyst for a reaction that produces molecules that are the basis for Nylon 6,6, a commodity polymer that all of us buy and use every day. It, for example, is used in apparel, auto components, electrical connectors, toothbrushes, camping gear and medical devices.
“This combination of biology and electricity is unique to Iowa State,” said Tessonnier, the Richard C. Seagrave Professor in Chemical and Biological Engineering. “I don’t know anybody else in the U.S. who’s doing this.”
