ICOM 2011 Oral presentation award for Olga Kattan and David Vermaas

At the International Congress on Membranes and Membrane Processes, the world's largest conference on fundamental and applied membrane science, engineering and technology, held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands in July 2011, Olga Kattan and David Vermaas won a student award for their oral presentations. Four of the 6 oral presentation awards were sponsored by the European Membrane Society (EMS) while the other 2 were sponsored by the Australasian Membrane Society (AMS). Besides the compliment of winning an award, the prizes consisted of a certificate and either 500 euro or 500 Australian dollars, respectively.

Olga Kattan’s presentation was entitled “Membranes in biorefinery applications”. During her talk, she pointed out the need of switching from conventional refinery to biorefinery and discussed the applicability of electrodialysis with commercial ion exchange membranes for the isolation of single amino acids to be used for the production of biochemicals.

David Vermaas presented new developments in the energy generation by Reverse Electrodialysis. He showed in this presentation that the power density obtained from mixing seawater and river water can be significantly improved by using profiled membranes and using small intermembrane distances.

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