Ladies Night for Women in Engineering Sciences

Post-combustion power plants are the major sources of CO2 emissions. Given that fossil fuels will be the major sources of energy in the next few years, capture of CO2 from these sources for sequestration could be a possible short term solution for abating greenhouse gas emissions. Pressure/Vacuum swing adsorption (P/VSA) processes using solid sorbents are considered as viable options. The presentation will have two parts. In the first, we report the systematic procedure for the synthesis of a P/VSA processes for dry CO2/N2 separation using zeolite 13X as adsorbent. Using equilibrium and kinetic parameters obtained in the laboratory, we screen several processes for adsorptive post-combustion capture. Based on multi-objective we identify the process that provides the best productivity-energy consumption trade-off. This process is then scaled for pilot-plant demonstration. These represent the first reports in the open-literature of an adsorptive process that achieves the purity and recovery targets set by the US Department of Energy in a single-stage process. The second part of the work deals with the issue of CO2 capture from wet flue gas. We report our recent results of developing a two-sorbent process for this purpose. We show that it is possible to capture CO2 from wet flue gas and discuss the additional energy that is required to achieve this. [more]

Ligand-responsive gene switches are cellular sensors that process specific signals into adjusted gene product responses and transform mammalian cells into useful cell-based machines for next-generation biotechnological and biomedical applications. In this talk, I will present how mammalian cells engineered with such gene switches can readily applied for biotechnological and diagnostic purposes. The construction of larger synthetic gene circuits, however, requires an additional gene control layer to connect multiple switches. RNA-based gene switches are perfectly suited for this function because they act on translation rather than transcription. In this talk, I will present how to build such RNA-based gene switches and implement them into large gene circuits with network topologies reminiscent to electronics that provide engineered cells the ability to perform complex information-processing tasks. [more]