For Pranda, an experimentalist, collaborating with student peers outside her area of expertise like Luo, whose work focuses on modeling chemical processes to understand their cost, was enlightening.

“I had never been part of a collaboration before, and I gained insight on how these other fields of chemical engineering work,” said Pranda.

According to Robert O’Dea, a doctoral student in the Epps lab and the paper’s lead author, Luo’s economic modeling contributions were key to knowing whether to pursue this line of research.

“We knew we could physically do it, but we needed to know whether it actually made any financial sense to do it at the scale of the chemical plant. Yuqing’s analysis showed it does,” said O’Dea.

Assessing technical lignin waste from different types of pulping processes, obtained from project collaborator CanmetENERGY in Canada, allowed Luo to consider how upstream costs like the feedstock price or yield would impact the economics further downstream in the process.

While the analysis demonstrated that yield plays a major role in plant economics, the cost to operate the new, low-pressure process was significantly lower than that of the conventional process in all cases because of reduced capital costs and the generation of valuable co-products. Researchers involved in developing the process, from the Epps group and colleagues in UD Professor Dionisios Vlachos’ research group, currently have a patent pending on the ambient pressure process.

Luo also performed a life-cycle assessment to understand how much greenhouse gas (e.g., carbon dioxide) emissions result from the materials production. Having a good handle on the costs at each step can help researchers explore ways to optimize the process and the material supply chain infrastructure.

“We were trying to capture the bigger picture, not just the costs of the process, but also the environmental impacts across the entire operation,” said Luo.

The student collaboration grew out of meetings between faculty and students involved in materials life-cycle management work at UD, under the NSF GCR program.

“It creates naturally high-impact work because the NSF GCR program encourages us to tackle aspects like the material science and the environmental impacts at the same time. So, we are overcoming multiple bottlenecks and hurdles concurrently through interdisciplinary collaboration,” said Epps.

And what about the UD-developed method’s potential for turning waste into valuable products?

“It shows there is a lot of potential for using renewable resources to make different types of plastics. You don't have to use fossil fuels, plastics from renewable resources can be economically feasible, too,” said Pranda.

In addition to Epps, O’Dea, Pranda and Luo, other co-authors on the paper include UD alumni Alice Amitrano and Elvis Ebikade; postdoctoral researcher Eric Gottlieb; Olumoye Ajao and Marzouk Benali from Natural Resources Canada, CanmetENERGY; and Dionisios Vlachos, Unidel Dan Rich Chair in Energy, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and director of the Catalysis Center for Energy Innovation; and Marianthi Ierapetritou, Bob and Jane Gore Centennial Chair of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering.