Speaker

About the speaker: 

Karla Dussan Rojas is a senior scientist at TNO and is currently involved in biorefinery projects, including EU projects such as Algae ProBANOS (high-value products from seaweed) and HIGFLY (Sustainable aviation fuels from biomass). Karla holds a PhD in Chemical & Environmental Sciences (University of Limerick, Ireland) and has dedicated the last 15 years to research activities in the field of biomass conversion to platform chemicals, chemolytic processes (aqueous and solvent-based), advanced characterization lignocellulosic and marine biomass and kinetic and process modelling.

Company info:

TNO, the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research, is a renowned independent research organization headquartered in the Netherlands, organized in 6 major areas of expertise in diverse fields such as technology, energy, healthcare, and defense. TNO's multidisciplinary approach fosters innovation and solutions to address some of the world's most pressing challenges. For more than a decade, TNO has developed know-how in the field of seaweed biorefinery bringing opportunities for potential applications by combining experimental seaweed research with process development. TNO continuously participates in national and international projects developing and implementing commercially viable and sustainable processes for the conversion of seaweed into biofuels, biochemicals and biobased materials.

Presentation:

Scalable, green and robust technologies for extraction of high-value products are needed to support feasible business cases for seaweed product applications. In this pitch, the organisation presents the process development and optimization framework applied for extraction of high-value polysaccharides from two seaweed species (Ulva sp. and F. lumbricalis) while considering various criteria such as extraction selectivity, process intensification and cost-effectiveness. This work highlights the importance of early process optimization and its impact on techno-economic feasibility of novel high-value products from seaweed.