Daniel Fozer

• PhD
• Professor (Assistant) at Technical University of Denmark

The imperative of a widespread, climate-neutral industrial transition necessitates adopting sustainable-by-design e-ammonia production practices. However, as is the case with early-stage technologies, its full potential in decarbonization and substituting conventional infrastructure at higher manufacturing readiness levels remains unknown. While le...

Global warming and climate change urge the deployment of close carbon-neutral technologies via the synthesis of low-carbon emission fuels and materials. An efficient intermediate product of such technologies is the biomethanol produced from biomass. Microalgae based technologies offer scalable solutions for the biofixation of CO2, where the produce...

The low efficiency of renewable electricity storage has been considered as a bottleneck of the scalable and low-carbon Power-to-Gas energy transformation concept. This paper investigates the combination of CO biofixation using Spirulina platensis microalgae and catalytic hydrothermal gasification of wet organic feedstock for the storage of fluctuat...

Assessing the prospective climate preservation potential of novel, innovative, but immature chemical production techniques is limited by the high number of process synthesis options and the lack of reliable, high-throughput quantitative sustainability pre-screening methods. This study presents the sequential use of data-driven hybrid prediction (AN...

Recycling and disposing wastewater from the pharmaceutical industry are of utmost importance in mitigating chemical waste generation, where unmanaged hazardous waste fluxes could cause massive environmental damage. Air stripping, steam stripping, distillation, and incineration offer significant emission reduction potentials for pharmaceutical appli...

The aim of process integration is the efficient use of energy and natural resources. However, process integration can result in a more precise process operation, that is, it influences controllability. Pressure-swing distillation processes are designed for the separation of azeotropic mixtures, but their inherent heat integration option can be util...

This study investigates the formic acid-mediated hydrothermal carbonisation (HTC) of microalgae biomass to enhance green hydrogen production. The effects of combined severity factor (CSF) and feedstock-to-suspension ratio (FSR) are examined on HTC gas formation, hydrochar yield and quality, and composition of the liquid phase. The hydrothermal conv...

In the chemical industry, a typical problem is the appropriate treatment of the process wastewaters. The biological treatment cannot be usually applied because of the high content of organochemical compounds. However, phsycicochemical methods can significantly contribute to the proper treatment of the process wastewater and usually also allows the...

The number of newly synthesized and produced organic chemicals has increased extremely quickly. However, the measurements of their physical properties, including their vapor−liquid equilibrium (VLE) data, are time-consuming. It so happens that there is no physical property data about a brand-new chemical. Therefore, the importance of calculating th...

The techniques of heterotrophic microalgae cultivation used to be resulting in higher productivity and better yield than autotrophic culturing. Batch cultivation strategy is commonly used with high glucose concentration, but its potential is limited for biomass production at an industrial scale. Usually, the best productivity can obtain at lower gl...

This work aims to propose a general data-driven plastic waste categorisation procedure that defines their recyclability based on classification into material recycling classes. The contamination in plastics, such as metal fillers or additives, is accumulated during the entire Life Cycle, which can be harmful to either mechanical or chemical recycli...

Nowadays, desalination continues to expand globally, which is one of the most effective solutions to solve the problem of the global drinking water shortage. However, desalination is not a fail-safe process and has many environmental and human health consequences. This paper investigated the desalination procedure of seawater with different technol...

This work aims to improve the synthesis of renewable hydrochar (HC) co-fired with coal to reduce grenhouse gas (GHG) emission. Acetic acid catalyzed hydrothermal carbonization (cHTC) of Chlorella vulgaris microalgae biomass was investigated based on a 3³⁻¹ fractional statistical design of the experiment to examine the effects of hydrothermal reacti...

The hybrid distillation-pervaporation process is an efficient method for the removal or recovery of volatile organic compounds from their aqueous mixtures. The hybrid distillation-pervaporation process has not only shown its excellent performance in the purification of solvent mixtures but also proven to have a potential of saving energy. In this s...

The chemical process design always includes the controllability investigation of the different design alternatives. An old-new energy integrated alternative for the reduction of the energy consumption of distillation column is the so called dividing-wall columns. There are some new structures where the dividing wall is positioned to the lower or th...

Acetaldehyde diethyl acetal (herein called acetal) is an important pollutant of anhydrous ethanol. Isobaric vapor−liquid equilibrium (VLE) of an ethanol−acetal binary system was measured using a vapor condensate and liquid circulation VLE still. The experimental data were correlated with Wilson, nonrandom two-liquid (NRTL), and universal quasichemi...

Encouraged by the industrial problem of removing water from methanol solutions, a simple exfoliation method is applied to prepare polyvinyl alcohol (PVA)/laponite nanoclay mixed matrix membranes (MMMs). The membranes are used for the pervaporative dehydration of the methanol-water solution. The influence of the nanoclay content on the pervaporation...

The exfoliation method was applied for the preparation of high-water selective mixed matrix membranes (MMMs), especially for the dehydration of C1−C3 alcohol−water solutions. Herein, a facile and easy method was employed to fabricate physically cross-linked Laponite nanosilicate clay−PVA MMMs without additional cross-linking by a one-step synthesis...

Pervaporation is a separation method that is considered as green technology because of its low energy consumption. The mechanism of component separation in a liquid mixture by pervaporation is complex but it can be explained with the solution-diffusion mechanism. The work is motivated by an industrial separation problem, that is, ethyl acetate remo...

Efficient processes save natural resources, e.g. chemicals, energy carriers. The Extractive Heterogeneous Azeotropic Distillation (EHAD) is an efficient, novel process for the separation of highly non-ideal liquid mixtures. On the one hand, it consumes less energy than any other separation process and on the other hand the separated compounds of hi...

In chemical recipes there can be found guidelines for efficient chemical production typically based on chemistry. However, such guidelines have never been checked with engineering methodologies for the sake of sustainability. A methodology is presented here on the case study problem of Grignard reagent production using tetrahydrofuran (THF) as solv...

There are different factors and indices to characterize the performance of a pervaporation membrane, but none of them gives information about their capabilities in the area of liquid separation compared to the most convenient alternative, which is distillation. Membrane flash index (MFLI) can be considered the first and only one that shows if the m...

Thermal crosslinking sequential method applied for DN-PVAs generation efficiently. The swelling measurements investigated that the hydrophilicity of the membrane decreases because of the collaboration of the second thermal crosslinked PVA matrix. The dehydration performance of ethanol solution showed improved using the thermal crosslinked double ne...

The study is motivated by the industrial problem from pharmaceutical industry, which is ethanol and methanol removal from process wastewater. To complete this goal hybrid method is investigated and optimized. Two distillation columns are sufficient for separation of alcohol-water mixture. Suitable water can be purified as bottom product of first co...

The separation of non-ideal mixtures using distillation can be an extremely complex process and there continues to be a need to further improve these techniques. A new method which combines extractive heterogeneous-azeotropic distillation (EHAD) and hydrophilic pervaporation (HPV) for the separation of non-ideal ternary mixtures is demonstrated. Th...

Laponite nanodiscs are low cost synthetic silicate clay with extreme hydrophilic behavior. Therefore, laponite can be used to enhance pervaporation membranes’ performance. Poly(vinyl alcohol), (PVA)/laponite pervaporation membranes were fabricated via simple exfoliation method of the nanoclay in the polymer solution followed by chemical crosslinkin...

This study investigates enhanced biogas production via co-Hydrothermal gasification (co-HTG) of wet Chlorella vulgaris biomass and hydrochar (HC). Hydrothermal carbonization was applied to valorize struvite containing waste microalgae stream into solid bio-fuel with improved combustion properties. The effects of HC quality and mixing ratio are inve...

The features of pervaporation are continuously improved with the production of more and more efficient membranes. In our present study, silver nanoparticles are in-situ generated in a poly (vinyl alcohol) using solution-casting in order to enhance its capability for pervaporation. The membrane is tested on the case study of ethanol dehydration by p...

In this study, pervaporation (PV) was used as a great promise for freshwater production from high-salinity water. Laponite nanodisc/poly (vinyl alcohol) (PVA) membranes were produced by simple exfoliation method of the nanoclay in the polymer solution using glutaraldehyde (GA). The surface morphology of the produced membrane and the influence of th...

Pervaporation (PV) has shown great promise in water desalination technology. In this work, Laponite XLG – Poly (vinyl alcohol) (PVA-Lap) mixed matrix membranes (MMMs) were fabricated to investigate the elaboration of desalination of high-salinity water by pervaporation. The influence of Laponite content on the morphology, chemical structure and hyd...

The distillation based separation can be extremely complex if highly non-ideal mixtures are to be separated. In spite of different successfully applied unit operations there is always a possible way to improve the distillation technique and widen its toolbar. A novel improvement in this area is the development of the extractive heterogeneous-azeotr...

In chemical laboratories there are always a permanent need to apply flexible, target oriented and efficient control solutions and data acquisition. Traditional equipment and methods utilized are however either time consuming or relatively expensive causing chemical laboratories often to be either not equipped with proper data acquisition and contro...

The problem of process wastewater arises not only in fine chemical industry, but also where water is used for washing. In these cases, surfactant material is given to the water, so its washing capability is enhanced. The used water contains surfactant material and dirt. It has high chemical oxygen demand (COD) resulting in serious environmental pro...

This study examines the light factorial optimization of Chlorella vulgaris microalgae cultivation under different wavelengths and light intensities. RGB light-emitting diodes were applied on microtiter plate and lab scale stirred tank photobioreactors. One-way ANOVA and response surface methodology were adopted to investigate the effects on biomass...

In the course of the present study, the pervaporative dehydration of two ternary mixtures: ethanol/n-butanol/water and ethanol/ethyl acetate/water were investigated through hydrophilic polymer composite PERVAP 1210 membrane. The effects of temperature and the concentrations of water and organic components on permeation were studied through pervapor...

The present work was performed because of the paramount importance of terephthalic acid (PTA) in the current chemical industry. It represents the missing element for the production of 100% bio-PET (polyethylene terephthalate) and has a market in continuous growth. The other monomer, mono ethylene glycol (MEG), is already widely available from renew...

The work is motivated by a separation problem, which is ethanol removal from aqueous mixtures with membranes. Ethanol can be considered as promising biomass based platform molecule. The platform molecule includes several building-block chemicals grouped together, resulting in a range of downstream chemical products. To solve the target, organophili...

Pervaporation is an important membrane separation method of chemical engineering. In this work silver-nanoparticles - poly (vinyl alcohol) nanocomposite membranes (AgNPs-PVA) are produced for the sake of improving its potentials for pervaporation of ethanol-water mixture so that the usual opposite trend between membrane selectivity and permeation c...

Biodiesel production showed an immense increase worldwide in the past decade. Since the comprehensive analyses of biodiesel production processes and their comparative evaluation are both rare and not informative enough, e.g., for scientists and decision makers, in this work different, favored biodiesel production alternatives (rapeseed, soybean and...

The industrial production unavoidably generates waste in many cases but that should be recycled and reused following the principle of circular economy. New waste treatment methods or green technologies with zero waste should be developed in order to solve this problem. Since zero emission technology is a difficult task, it is rather typical that wa...

In this investigation, metal-polymer hybrid nanocomposite films containing poly (vinyl alcohol) and silver nanoparticles (AgNPs/PVA) were prepared due to their potential application in various domains including separation and purification. The silver nanoparticles were generated in PVA matrix by the reduction of silver nitrate as silver ions with P...

The dividing wall columns have they renascence, however, there is lack of comprehensive investigation of column with upper and lower positioned walls. Previous work presented the energy efficiencies of dividing wall columns compared to common and energy integrated column structures. This paper presents a comprehensive study of controllability featu...

The work is motivated by an industrial problem, which is alcohol removal from pharmaceutical process wastewater. The aim of the study was to develop a complete hybrid operation is investigated. Ethanol dehydration, in combination with distillation and hydrophilic pervaporation, is used to investigate about the extent of separation of the ethanol-wa...

Chemical process design is the creative step of engineers which should be supported by different computer aided design tools. Such tools should be simple and easy to use since process synthesis often means the investigation of a huge number of alternatives. While designing separation of liquid mixtures, among many others, distillation and pervapora...

Washing detergents in process wastewaters from fine chemical industry produce high Chemical Oxygen Demand (COD), which poses a serious environmental problem. Method has to be found, which follows the principles of circular economy so that the treated water can be recycled or reused. Heat pump vacuum evaporator is evaluated in order to reduce the Ch...

The work is motivated by an industrial environmental problem, which is ethanol removal from aqueous mixture. To complete this goal organophilic pervaporation of ethanol/water mixture through commercially available Sulzer PERVAP™ 4060 is investigated to obtain information about the removal of ethanol. The experimental results are obtained at differe...

This study continues our research about dividing-wall distillation columns (DWCs).1 Thermodynamic efficiencies and heat demands are investigated to offer a more complex point of view for comparing distillation technologies. Rigorous simulations of nine distillation based separation systems are completed and the results are studied. Among the separa...

The distillation based separation can be extremely complex if highly non-ideal mixtures are to be separated. In spite of different successfully applied unit operations there is still possibility to improve distillation technique and widen its toolbar. A new improvement in this area is the introduction of the extractive heterogeneous-azeotropic dist...

Microalgae-based biorefineries for the production of renewable biofuels like biodiesel, upgraded bio-oil, bio-char, biogas and other high-value chemicals have received great attention in recent decades as potential major sources of energy for the future. Microalgae are a suitable species to produce biodiesel and other high energy density by-product...

The circular economy has the basic principle that the industrial production should follow the principles of the nature, that is, there should be no waste of any technology. If there were waste inevitably produced it should be recovered and recycled ito that technology where it can be used. In the fine chemical industry, particularly in the pharmace...

Pharmaceutical industry produces various types of waste. Part of these waste are already treated but certain wastewaters are still to be recycled or reused following the principle of circular economy. In most cases the treatment method must be developed individually respectively to the waste composition. A usual example of process wastewater is the...

Microalgae has gained great attention in recent decades because of the potential to produce valuable components such as high energy density containing biofuels (e.g., biodiesel, bio-char, biogas), proteins, fertilizers, pharmaceuticals and animal feeds. In order to enhance the microlagae’s growth rate and production, the ideal levels of the growth...