On November 14, 2017, the Drexel Chemical Engineering Department participated in an AIChE, Delaware Valley Section Poster Symposium hosted by FMC at nearby FMC tower in University City. The focus of the night was sustainability with a variety of posters from local chemical engineering students focused on batteries, seaweed, composites, films, plant based materials and nanofibers, to name a few. Multiple universities participated, but Drexel had the strongest showing; Drexel students or faculty presented more than half of the posters.
Noteworthy among the posters was a project sponsored by FMC and performed at Drexel as part of a collaboration between the Wrenn and Alvarez groups, along with the Marcolongo group in Drexel’s Material Science & Engineering Department. The long-term goal of the project is to improve the extraction of alginate (an FMC product) from seaweed (FMC harvests the seaweed in Norway, among other locations). Together the team investigated the alginate distribution within the seaweed plant using a variety of microscopy and staining techniques. Additionally, the team studied gelation kinetics of alginate, as well as the strengths of the final gel, systematically as a function of cation type and amount for alginates of varying molecular weights. This information can now be used to guide extraction of the alginate from the seaweed, where it exists in gel form. The students who contributed to this project were undergraduates Danielle Fernandez, Kevin Mercedes, and Brienna Ogilvie and doctoral student Martin Walsh. Special thanks to Katya Prudnikova of Materials Science & Engineering for staining and absorbance studies.
