NPS11 Oral presentation award for Olga Kattan

At NPS11 (11th Annual Netherlands Process Technology Symposium), the biggest symposium in The Netherlands for engineers and scientists active in the field of process engineering, held in October 2011, Olga Kattan won the presentation award for her oral presentation. The prize consisted of 2500 Euro to be spent for an international conference.

Olga Kattan’s presentation was entitled “Isolation of single amino acids for biorefinery applications using electrodialysis”. In her talk she emphazised the importance of switching from conventional refinery to biorefinery concepts and introduced the integration of enzymatic conversion and membrane electrodialysis as an interesting route for the production of biobased chemicals. She discussed the importance and challenges of controlling specific process parameters, among which especially pH, for improved process performance. The results show that electrodialysis with commercial ion exchange membranes is a promising technology that leads to pure product streams to be used for the production of biochemicals.

For more information, please contact Dr. Kitty Nijmeijer (d.c.nijmeijer@utwente.nl; phone: +31 53 489 4185).