environment – Progress in Research

Recovery of high value-added proteins from poultry industry waste

Posted on 17/07/202306/08/2024 by Erik Franco

Today, the animal-based food industry is one of the most critical and environmentally impactful: in the European Union alone, poultry farms produce more than 3 million tonnes of feather waste annually which is incinerated, thus releasing polluting by-products into the atmosphere.

In this context, the KARATE (Keratin smARt mATerials from feather wastE) project, coordinated by Politecnico di Milano and funded by Fondazione Cariplo within the framework of the call Circular Economy – Promoting research for a sustainable future, aims at reducing the environmental impact of the poultry production chain, contributing significantly to the revaluation and reuse of its waste, in order to transform it into high added value products. In particular, KARATE envisages the valorisation of waste feathers as a raw material for obtaining organic molecules of broad interest such as peptides and proteins, to be used as a basis for developing intelligent, high-performance biomaterials for the textile and biomedical sectors.

The project is coordinated by Pierangelo Metrangolo, full professor in Fundamentals of Chemistry for Technologies at the Department of Chemistry, Materials and Chemical Engineering “Giulio Natta” of Politecnico di Milano. It involves three other research partners (Fondazione Istituto Insubrico Ricerca per la Vita, Consorzio Italbiotec and Centro de Investigacións Científicas Avanzadas of the Universidade da Coruña) and 11 industrial entities (BiCT Bioindustry Innovation, Kialab, Klopman, Linari Engineering S.r.l., Lombardy Green Chemistry Association, Revita Technology, ROELMI HPC, Società Agricola Bruzzese S.S., Solvay Specialty Polymers, VEGEA).

Environmental benefits of floating offshore wind farms

Posted on 12/07/202306/08/2024 by Erik Franco

Offshore wind farms, on which great expectations are placed for decarbonising electricity production, ensure environmental benefits throughout their life cycle. This emerges from a study published in the international journal Sustainable Production and Consumption in which researchers from Politecnico di Milano analysed the potential environmental impacts of a floating offshore wind farm undergoing authorisation off the coast of Sicily.

The analysis included the phases of procurement of materials, transport of components, assembly and installation with specialised vessels, maintenance during operation, disassembly and end-of-life.

Overall, the results of the analysis provide a rough indication, which is useful for becoming aware of the environmental loads of a renewable electricity generation system and comparing it with other energy sources.

Results show that comparing 1 GWh of energy taken from the national grid with 1 Gwh of energy produced by the wind farm, the overall impacts of wind power are significantly reduced for almost all impact categories analysed: in the ‘climate change’ category, the benefit is a 92% reduction in impacts, and worsening is only observed in the ‘abiotic depletion’ category (+95%). Furthermore, this technology would allow to avoid generating energy from fossil fuels, and therefore, as the results show, related investments would be quickly repaid in terms of greenhouse gas emissions and energy, in 2 and 3 years, respectively.

Scientific literature is still insufficient when it comes to life cycle analysis (LCA) of offshore wind farms with large turbines (over 15 MW) installed on floating structures reflecting recent industry developments and current market trends. However, in order to assess their true environmental sustainability, it is important to analyse renewable electricity generation technologies from a life-cycle perspective.

Authors of this study are, Mario Grosso, professor in Solid Waste Management and Treatment; Lucia Rigamonti, professor in Methodologies for Life Cycle Thinking; and Gaia Brussa, researcher at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

The study online

Controlling the shape of a drop is possible

Posted on 06/07/202306/08/2024 by Erik Franco

Controlling the shape of a drop is a revolutionary discovery and will soon enable us to manufacture liquid technology devices in the pharmaceutical and environmental fields. Through the encapsulation of one liquid in another, applications such as the controlled release of drugs, emulsification processes and, for example, the clean-up of spills of liquid pollutants such as oil will be possible.

Researchers at the Politecnico di Milano in collaboration with the Aalto University of Helsinki and the University of Oxford conducted a study on the shape control of droplets consisting of a mixture of water and a protein (hydrophobin).

While a drop of pure fluid, e.g. of water alone, always retains its initial shape during evaporation, these drops made of a water-hydrophobin mixture, on the other hand, show surprising changes in shape during evaporation,
Pierangelo Metrangolo from the Department of Chemistry, Materials and Chemical Engineering ‘Giulio Natta’

This research demonstrates the importance of a multidisciplinary approach to drive innovation: the interaction between mathematics and chemistry has enabled the understanding of a new physical phenomenon and its transfer to technology to engineer innovative materials that will revolutionise various industrial applications.

The collaborative work of the authors of the study, Pasquale Ciarletta, Pierangelo Metrangolo and Davide Riccobelli, was funded by Regione Lombardia’s NewMed project to create innovative methods and materials for precision and personalised medicine.

In fact, the hydrophobin initially dissolved in water reaches the drop’s free surface during evaporation and begins to self-assemble to create a thin film that encapsulates the drop and allows its shape to be controlled thanks to a particular combination of certain gravity conditions and the chemical and mechanical properties of the solute that is unveiled and described by a mathematical model,
Pasquale Ciarletta of the Politecnico di Milano’s Department of Mathematics

The results of these studies have been published in the prestigious scientific journal Physical Review Letters.

The study online

Training school on modelling compound climate-related events

Posted on 24/05/202206/08/2024 by Erik Franco

The project “Training school on modelling compound climate-related events” has won a grant of 10,000 euros as a T.I.M.E. project.

June and July 2021 have been characterised by extraordinary natural events, like the heatwave occurred on the Pacific Coast of the United States and Canada, and the flood event occurred in Northern Europe. These events extended over rather large spatial and temporal scales, and manifested with cascading effects, interconnected behaviours and hazards. They are classified as “compound climate-related events”.

They are an emerging topic in science for the enormous impact on society. Compound climate-related events can pose serious threats to natural systems and human societies. Modelling and predicting compound events require knowledge on advanced statistical methods.

The project proposes a Training School on Modelling Compound climate-related Events to train the next generation of researchers and scientists to deal with such complex and impactful events. The school, targeted for PhD students, will be two weeks long, and provide tools and methodologies to investigate compound events. In addition, there will be ample time to work on scientific projects organized in four small groups and socialize with the other participants and lecturers.

The coordinator of the project is the Politecnico di Milano, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, with Prof. Carlo De Michele as principal investigator. The project involves also Technische Universität Dresden (Germany) and Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium).

The T.I.M.E. Association (Top International Managers in Engineering), founded in 1989, is a network of leading technical universities and engineering schools in Europe and all over the world, with a strong international dimension in teaching, research and industrial relations. The association currently consists of 57 members in 25 countries, and the Politecnico di Milano is a member of the Advisory Committee.

Besides double degree activities, T.I.M.E. promotes a series of other initiatives, including the T.I.M.E. projects, through which the association co-finances new or existing initiatives between member universities, in which T.I.M.E. can represent an added value.

LIGHT-CAP: sustainable solutions for conversion and storage of solar energy

Posted on 15/10/202106/08/2024 by Erik Franco

Environmental sustainability is today a focal aspect of technological innovation and European research policies. The European Union is ready to achieve the ambitious objective of climate neutrality by 2050, and fundamental to this aim is the promotion of new solutions for energy, from renewable sources, such as solar energy, and with efficient effective energy consumption.

Politecnico di Milano is a partner in the LIGHT-CAP project, and as such it is pursuing the goal of bringing about radical change regarding methodologies used for conversion and storage of solar energy. Still today, these are based primarily on silicone solar panels and bulky batteries, kept separate in two different devices. LIGHT-CAP will introduce a new nanotechnology-based architecture able to combine the two functions of conversion and storage in a single versatile device.

LIGHT-CAP has obtained funding worth 3.18 million euros from the European Union and the consortium, coordinated by the IIT-Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, includes EU and non-EU partners with academic and industrial backgrounds, in order to also be able to produce the first prototypes at the end of the project. In Italy in addition to the IIT, it also sees the involvement of Politecnico di Milano and the IIT start-up, Bedimensional, active in the production of nanomaterials and their implementation in devices for energy applications..

The aim of the LIGHT-CAP project is to manufacture a device similar to a battery charged by light; exposed, for example, to sunlight, the device charges like a normal battery plugged into a power outlet. Again like a normal battery, the energy stored can be used to power portable apparatus. To do this today,it takes two devices, a photovoltaic cell and a battery. The project device will be able to do both things.

The mechanism at the base is the separation of positive and negative charges after light irradiation on interfacing between two nanomaterials, one made up of nanoparticles measuring just a few nanometres, the other as fine as one or a few atoms like graphene.

To do this, Politecnico di Milano will use ultrafast continuous spectroscopy techniques (up to a time resolution of just a few femtoseconds) to study the optical properties of manufactured nanomaterials. The fundamental interactions between the different types of nanomaterials in liquid-liquid, liquid-solid, and solid-solid interfaces will also be studied.. The experimental measurements will be corroborated by a variety of theoretical models.

Politecnico di Milano will coordinate the project’s second Work Package, which focuses on the optical characterisation, optoelectronic characterisation and electrical characterisation of the new nanomaterials and new interfaces and heterojunctions.

The researchers will be using eco-compatible, easy-to-source materials (such as many minerals in the earth’s crust), to avoid supply-related criticalities. The project’s innovative ideas were successful in the Horizon 2020 European call for proposals for “Breakthrough zero-emissions energy storage and conversion technologies for climate-neutrality” as part of the “FET Proactive: Emerging Paradigms and Communities” programme.

The LIGHT-CAP comprises: the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (Italy), the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (Switzerland), the Technische Universitaet Dresden (Germany), the Justus-Liebig-Universitaet Giessen (Germany), Politecnico di Milano (Italy) and the Fundacion IMDEA Energia (Spain). The project also benefits from collaboration with a non-EU research group at the ‘Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology in Japan, which will provide key competences in the synthesis and application of graphene-based nanomaterials. Further support will also come from the IIT start-up Be-Dimensional and from the company “Thales Research and Technology”.