The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded $390,261 to Zhen “Jason” He, professor of energy, environmental and chemical engineering at Washington University in St. Louis’ McKelvey School of Engineering.
He is working to create a a more economically viable, sustainable waste conversion technology to recoup resources from wastewater. He is developing a new approach to restructure anaerobic digesters — current conversion technology — so that they provide a byproduct more valuable than their current byproduct: biogas.
He’s team will do this by inhibiting the formation of methane, which leads to the accumulation volatile fatty acids (VFAs). This will allow for the collection of the valuable VFAs from existing anaerobic digesters without the need for entirely new systems.
Beyond the science, He plans to use his discoveries to guide technological development. This will allow researchers to quickly scale up the system they develop, allowing them to identify additional problems more quickly. In turn, this should speed up the transition from lab prototypes to real-world wastewater resource recovery systems.
