Qua, 21 março 2018, 12:00 - 13:00
Tipo de evento:
Seminário
Localização específica:
Room 217D- Edifício Departamental
Ana Rita Duarte
LAQV, FCT NOVA
Des.solve – when solids become liquids: natural deep eutectic solvents for chemical process engineering
Chaired by Manuel Nunes da Ponte
Abstract
Sugars, aminoacids or organic acids are typically solid at room temperature. Nonetheless when combined at a particular molar fraction they present a high melting point depression, becoming liquids at room temperature. These are called Natural Deep Eutectic Solvents – NADES. NADES are envisaged to play a major role on different chemical engineering processes in the future, playing a significant role towards the development of greener and sustainable processes. Nonetheless, there is a significant lack of knowledge on fundamental and basic research on NADES, which is hindering their industrial applications. For this reason it is important to extend the knowledge on these systems, boosting their application development. NADES applications go beyond chemical or materials engineering and cover a wide range of fields from biocatalysis, extraction, electrochemistry, carbon dioxide capture or biomedical applications. In this presentation we review some of the work we have developed in the past three years and highlight some of the advancements foreseen in the area which may bring significant advances to the state of the art.
Short Bio
Ana Rita C. Duarte was born in Lisbon in 1978. Currently Associate Professor at the Chemistry Department from Faculdade de Ciências Tecnologia, Universidade Nova de Lisboa. She was previsously Research Assistant at the 3B’s research group at Universidade do Minho, where she worked for 10 years. She graduated in Chemical Engineering by Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia, Universidade Nova de Lisboa in 2002 and completed her PhD on Exploring supercritical fluid technology for the preparation of controlled drug delivery systems in 2006 by the same University. In 2006/2007 she was a researcher at Techniche Universiteit Delft, The Netherlands.
The International Society for Advancement of Supercritical Fluids granted her thesis the Best Thesis Award in 2007. In 2013 she was awarded a Fulbright Scholar to support her stay at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she was for a period of 6 months. In 2015 as part of the team of the project HydrUStent, Ana Rita won the Novo Banco Innovation Award, one of the major innovations awards in Portugal and in 2016 she co-founded the start-up HydrUStent. In 2016 she was awarded an ERC consolidator grant entitled: DES.solve – When Solids Become Liquids: Natural Deep Eutectic solvents for Chemical Process Engineering, to proceed the developments on green technologies.
At the moment, she has 86 papers listed in web of knowledge with a total of 1874 citations, and an h-index of 26. Her main research interests are the use of green technologies for the development of biomaterials. In particular, the use of water, ionic liquids, supercritical fluids together with the exploration of natural deep eutectic solvents for natural-based polymer processing are her main scientific interests.
