Grant: Research Tools and Instruments - Category 1 (<$150,000)

Renewable energy and improvement of the environment have been the focus of all research projects carried out by Drs. Hill, Nemati and Niu (and their research personnel) over the past several decades. Current renewable energy research topics include the production of ethanol from ligno-cellulosic sugars as a renewable source of liquid fuel. The world demand for liquid fuel is outstripping supplies, and the use of waste biomass will contribute significantly to solving this deficit in the future. Although the hexose sugars from cellulose and hemi-cellulose can be readily converted to ethanol, more work needs to be done to turn pentose sugars into ethanol. Another important topic is to clean petroleum contaminated waters, soils and gases using inexpensive microbial or biological technologies. Research projects include developing novel bioreactors to achieve these goals. Each investigation by a graduate student or summer research student requires hundreds of measurements to quantify the production of ethanol, use of sugars and disappearance of toxic chemicals. This proposal involves the purchase of an HPLC with two types of detectors that can quickly measure sugars and organic chemicals in water solutions. This machines is needed to gather data to characterize the ability of our new bioreactors to produce inexpensive ethanol from waste biomass; or to remove toxic chemicals from industrial wastewater, soils and gas effluents.