Daria Camilla Boffito,
Canada Research Chair in Engineering Process Intensification and Catalysis (EPIC) and Associate Professor,
Polytechnique Montréal
Daria C. Boffito is Associate professor in Chemical Engineering at Polytechnique Montréal. She is Canada Research Chair (2021-2026) in Engineering Process Intensification and Catalysis (EPIC) and head of the EPIC research team. She was previously Canada Research Chair in Intensified Mechano-Chemical Processes for Sustainable Biomass Conversion (2016-2021). In 2019 she was featured as an Emerging Leader in Chemical Engineering (Canadian Society for Chemical Engineering).
She received prestigious Canadian and International prizes. As a post-doc at Polytechnique Montréal she was awarded an FRQNT Fellowship - Excellence Program for Foreign Students (2013). In 2014 she received the NSERC Banting post-doctoral fellowship. During her PhD at the University of Milan (2010-2013), she was selected as part of the "GreenTalents 2012", a German Government competition that identifies every year the most promising young scientists worldwide in the field of sustainability. She spent part of her PhD at The University of Melbourne, with a fellowship from the Australian Government. Prof. Boffito's research interests include process intensification, biomass conversion, heterogeneous catalysis (and photocatalysis), CO2 conversion, synthesis and mechanism of drug delivery systems, metal recovery, and scientific communication. She co-authored the book "Communicate Science Papers, Presentations, and Posters Effectively", as well as a series of 20 articles in the Canadian Journal of Chemical Engineering, which included bibliometrics. Prof. Boffito works with several Canadian and international companies in the fields of gas-to-liquids, process intensification technologies, biomass conversion, and metal extraction. She has trained over 80 students/post-docs since becoming a professor in 2016. Her EPIC team now includes people in Chemical, Biomedical and Material Engineering programs. She has published over 100 papers, 9 book chapters, 4 patents, and 1 book.
Process Intensification: Producing More with Less
Thursday, 5 October 2023 at 14:00
Add to Calendar ▼2023-10-05 14:00:002023-10-05 15:00:00Europe/LondonProcess Intensification: Producing More with LessFlow Chemistry Asia 2023 in Tokyo, JapanTokyo, JapanSELECTBIOenquiries@selectbiosciences.com
Economic growth while accounting for social needs, climate change and environmental protection are key to tackle the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN-SDGs) and accelerate the energy transition towards the electrification of the chemical industry. Green technologies based on cleaner energy sources such as biofuels, hydroelectricity, wind and natural gas are a global priority. Their implementation cannot only rely on existing industrial infrastructures but needs new resources and space. This represents a limit to the increase in the production capacity of existing chemical plants and to the development of new technologies. Process Intensification (PI) is a new archetype of the chemical industry that targets order of magnitude improvements to manufacture chemicals by either retooling existing facilities or finding new smaller, more efficient breakthrough technologies. Examples of PI technologies include HiGee reactors (e.g. spinning-disc reactors), alternative energy vectors to power chemical processes (ultrasound, microwaves, plasma), static mixers, and membrane reactors. In this talk, Prof. Boffito will show how PI still struggles to find a definition, despite the undisputable advantages. These include, for instance, energy, capital and operational expenditures (CapEx and OpEx) savings in the 20-80% range, and a reduction of emitted CO2 eq. up to 80%. She will also explain how PI represents a paradigm-shift that, by a matter of fact will change the chemical industry in the upcoming years. Prof. Boffito will browse the available methods to intensify chemical processes, specifically those for carbon capture and utilization (CCU), and will explain why we need to apply them both to existing and new processes. Further, she will highlight how PI can contribute to attain the UN-SDGs.
