Miao Guo

King's College London | KCL · Department of Engineering

Accurate prediction of Global Warming Potential (GWP) is essential for assessing the environmental impact of chemical processes and materials. Traditional GWP prediction models rely predominantly on molecular structure, overlooking critical process-related information. In this study, we present an integrative GWP prediction model that combines mole...

The current global food system produces substantial waste and carbon emissions while exacerbating the effects of global hunger and protein deficiency. This study aims to address these challenges by exploring the use of lignocellulosic agricultural residues as feedstocks for microbial protein fermentation, focusing on Fusarium venenatum A3/5, a myce...

The current global food system produces substantial waste and carbon emissions while exacerbating the effects of global hunger and protein deficiency. This study aims to address these challenges by exploring the use of lignocellulosic agricultural residues as feedstocks for microbial protein fermentation, focusing on Fusarium venenatum A3/5, a myce...

Chemicals are commonly dosed in sewer systems to reduce the emission of hydrogen sulfide (H2S) and methane (CH4), incurring high costs and environmental concerns. Nitrite dosing is a promising approach as nitrite can be produced from urine wastewater, which is a feasible integrated water management strategy. However, nitrite dosing usually requires...

Food waste represents a growing global crisis equivalent to ∼1.3 billion tonnes/year. This review provides an overview of the potential of food waste as a carbon source for microbial upcycling using anaerobic digestion (AD) for bioenergy coupled with single-cell protein (SCP) production. We estimate biogas potential from food waste to be sufficient...

Historically, optimisation processes for supply chains have primarily focused on maximising economic objectives. However, with the challenges posed by climate change, there has been a shift towards integrating environmental considerations into optimisation processes alongside economic criteria, which can be facilitated by life cycle assessment. Thi...

The transformation to a resource-circular bio-economy offers a mechanism to mitigate climate change and environmental degradation. As advanced bioeconomy components, biorenewables derived from terrestrial, aquatic biomass and waste resources are expected to play significant roles over the next decades. This study provides an overview of potential b...

Dimensionality reduction techniques are crucial for enabling deep learning driven quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) models to navigate higher dimensional toxicological spaces, however the use of specific techniques is often arbitrary and poorly explored. Six dimensionality techniques (both linear and non-linear) were hence applied...

Potential external cost savings associated with the reduction of animal-sourced foods remain poorly understood. Here we combine life cycle assessment principles and monetarization factors to estimate the monetary worth of damage to human health and ecosystems caused by the environmental impacts of food production. We find that, globally, approximat...

Wastewater systems are transitioning towards integrative process systems to recover multiple resources whilst simultaneously satisfying regulations on final effluent quality. This work contributes to the literature by bringing a systems-thinking approach to resource recovery from wastewater, harnessing surrogate modelling and mathematical optimisat...

Sulfide control is a significant problem in urban sewer management. Although in-sewer dosing of chemicals has been widely applied, it is prone to high chemical consumption and cost. A new approach is proposed in this study for effective sulfide control in sewers. It involves advanced oxidation of ferrous sulfide (FeS) in sewer sediment, to produce...

A waste-to-protein system that integrates a range of waste-to-protein upgrading technologies has the potential to converge innovations on zero-waste and protein security to ensure a sustainable protein future. We present...

Nitrogen is the most crucial element in the production of nutritious feeds and foods. The production of reactive nitrogen by means of fossil fuel has thus far been able to guarantee the protein supply for the world population. Yet, the production and massive use of fertilizer nitrogen constitute a major threat in terms of environmental health and s...

Plant- and animal-sourced proteins are carbon-intensive and vulnerable to extreme events. This combined with increasing protein demands highlight the challenge on providing sustainable protein derived from alternative sources. Microbial protein derived from microorganisms offers potential solutions. Notably, some microbial strains e.g. Fusarium ven...

Increasing demand for animal-sourced protein is a major driver of the food system’s transgression of the safe environmental operating limits known as planetary boundaries. Microbial proteins are being explored as an alternative to provide sustainable protein security within the planetary boundaries. Here, a design and optimization framework was dev...

A waste-to-protein system that integrates a range of waste-to-protein upgrading technologies has the potential to converge innovations on zero-waste and protein security to ensure a sustainable protein future. We present a global overview of food-safe and feed-safe waste resource potential and technologies to sort and transform such waste streams w...

Food-processing wastewater (FPWW), as opposed to solid residues, occurs extensively throughout the world, and has considerable potential for resource recovery (RR), however, at present, it is severely underutilized. This paper serves as a suggested ‘plan forward’ to optimize integrated RR from FPWW. In order to optimize this potential and ‘close th...

Microbial proteins provide a sustainable and nutritious alternative to traditional animal and plant-based proteins. Various strains have been demonstrated to generate biomass from a wide variety of substrates, from organic waste (e.g. banana peel) to gases (e.g. methane). Industrial production of microbial protein has proven difficult from both des...

Algal biomass is a promising feedstock for sustainable production of a range of value-added compounds and products including food, feed, fuel. To further augment the commercial value of algal metabolites, efficient valorization methods and biorefining channels are essential. Algal extracts are ideal sources of biotechnologically viable compounds lo...

Gaussian Processes present a versatile surrogate modeling toolbox to address simulation-based optimization and uncertainties arising from non-converged simulations. In this work we present a black-box optimization methodology framework in which Gaussian Process Regression is used to model complex underlying process performance models and Gaussian P...

Millions of tonnes of rice husk (RH) are produced annually as an agricultural waste. One area of interest for RH valorisation is to use rice husk ash (RHA, a by-product of RH combustion) as a replacement for mineral-derived synthetic amorphous silica (M-SAS). However, little information is available on the environmental benefit of this approach. Th...

The production of Synthetic Amorphous Silica (SAS) is a billion-dollar industry. However, very little is shared publicly on the environmental impact of SAS production. This work provides the first complete...

We investigated the short-term dynamics of microbial composition and function in bioreactors with inocula collected from full-scale and lab-based AD (anaerobic digestion) systems. The Bray-Curtis dissimilarity of both inocula was approximately 10% of the predicted KEGG pathway and 40% of the taxonomic composition, and yet resulted in a similar perf...

The environmental impacts of food are currently at unsustainable levels. Consumers undoubtedly play a central role in reducing the impacts of the food system to more sustainable levels via dietary changes and food waste reduction. Mathematical optimisation is one approach to identifying less environmentally impactful dietary patterns. A limited num...

Globally, one in nine people suffer from undernourishment with evidence that this number is increasing. Additionally, due to the projected 50% increase in global population, the demand in worldwide animal-sourced...

The overwhelming concerns due to over exploitation of fossil resources necessitate the utilization of alternative energy resources. Biodiesel has been considered as one of the most adaptable alternative to fossil-derived diesel with similar properties and numerous environmental benefits. Although there are various approaches for biodiesel productio...

Rapid changes in the global climate resulting from anthropogenic activities and greenhouse gas emissions from fossil resources are encouraging commercial and academic research to seek out new routes for the production of sustainable fuels. Biodiesel, as a renewable fuel, has long been recognized as one of the solutions to meet energy demand in a cl...

Process industry remains one of the difficult-to-decarbonise sectors globally. To mitigate industrial greenhouse gas (GHGs) emissions, an eco-industrial energy systems (e-IES) optimisation framework is proposed by coupling mathematical optimisation with clustering algorithms and first principle modelling. Within the framework, a rooftop farming dat...

The negative effects of climate change coupled with declining fossil fuel reserves have sparked interest in cleaner alternative fuel sources. Methanol has surfaced as an acceptable solution due to its practicality and high hydrogen content. With its increased popularity, global demand supports the advent of the mega-methanol (MM) industry. Consider...

Increasing electric vehicles (EV) penetration leads to significant challenges in EV battery disposal. Reusing retired batteries in distributed energy systems (DES) offers resource-circular solutions. We propose an optimisation framework to model the emerging supply chains and design strategies for reusing the retired EV batteries in DES. Coupling a...

As the global methanol industry faces greater financial constraints imposed by climate change mitigation, climate smart process design aligned to low carbon operations takes precedence. Here we present multiple decision criteria facilitated by techno-economic and environmental assessments, to better inform decision-making on current and future clim...

Organic fraction municipal solid waste (OFMSW) has a high potential for energy and value-added product recovery due to its carbon- and nutrient-rich composition; however, traditional value chains have treated OFMSW as an undesired by-product. This study focuses on value chain optimisation to assist the transition to resource recovery value chains....

Urban rooftop functional design offers a promising option to enable multi-function urban land-use to deliver multiple ecosystem services, e.g., food production by rooftop agriculture and energy supply by installing photovoltaic (PV) panels. To identify the best rooftop utilization strategy considering multiple decision-criteria and understand the i...

The global food system inextricably connects human health and environmental integrity. It holds the transformative capability to significantly reduce levels of environmental degradation, caused by current food production practices, and alleviate the ‘triple burden’ of malnutrition, existing due to food consumption patterns. System-wide transitions...

Within the current global climate, precedence has been set on achieving greater sustainable development within process industries. The ammonia process (BAU case) has been labelled as a significant greenhouse gas (GHG) producer-mainly due to high energy demand and CO 2 emissions. This places the process under substantial scrutiny in terms of its cli...

As concerns intensify over the increasing impact of human activities on the environment, efforts are underway in several areas in order to mitigate the worst effects. In recent years agricultural systems have received intense public scrutiny and if the global population increases, then the risk to food security is of real concern. Food-grade Single...

Increasing electric vehicles (EV) penetration leads to significant challenges in EV battery disposal. Reusing retired batteries in distributed energy systems (DES) offers resource-circular solutions. We propose an optimisation framework to model the emerging supply chains and design strategies for reusing the retired EV batteries in DES. Coupling a...

Supplementing the increasing global methanol demand has forced traditional methanol processing to evolve towards mega-methanol production (MM). With strong legislative change supporting greater adherence to environmental quality, global producers will need to consider a more sustainable process design. Therefore, the need exists to identify viable...

Trinidad and Tobago, one of the largest exporters of ammonia globally, has seen recent declines in natural gas availability making cutbacks in productivity necessary. This paper investigates, for the first time, effects of natural gas availability on environmental burden and operational profit across the ammonia process. Utilizing Aspen® Plus, a mo...

This article presents data affiliated with life cycle inventories, environmental impact and operational sustainability used in, the influence of raw material availability and utility power consumption on the sustainability of the ammonia process [1]. Scenario specific operating conditions were used to simulate the ammonia process based on unique co...

Due to complex composition of carbohydrates, lipid, protein, cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin, wastewater (WW) and organic fraction municipal solid waste (OFMSW) represent nutrient and carbon rich resources. Conventionally, value chains in the waste sector have considered OFMSW and WW as unwanted by-products as opposed to potential valuable reso...

It is critical for reliable infrastructure planning to address the Food-Energy-Water-Waste (FEW2) nexus at system level. This paper presents the applicability of resilience.io platform across water, energy and waste sectors (including food and agricultural waste) with focus on waste-to-energy pathway, aiming to establish the optimal FEW2 nexus base...

To meet the demands for resources, food and energy, especially in fast developing countries in the Global South, new infrastructure investments, technologies and supply chains are required. It is essential to manage a transition that minimises the impacts on global environmental degradation while benefits local socio-economic development. Food-bioe...

Anaerobic digestion (AD) has been commercially operated worldwide in full scale as a resource recovery technology underpinning a circular economy. However, problems such as a long start-up time, or system instability, have been reported in response to operational shocks. These issues are usually linked to the dynamics of the functional microbiota i...

A surrogate-based superstructure optimisation framework is presented and applied to the design of optimal flowsheets for the recovery of resources from wastewater. The process systems design framework involves training artificial neural networks (ANNs) using data sampled from commercial simulation software, where the sampling strategy incorporates...

Due to complex composition e.g. carbohydrates, lipids, protein, lignin, cellulose and hemicellulose, organic fraction municipal solid waste (OFMSW) represent nutrient and carbon rich resources. Full utilisation of OFMSW resources requires a value chain transformation towards pro-active resource recovery. This study focuses on the waste value chain...

It is critical for reliable infrastructure planning to address the Food-Energy-Water-Waste (FEW2) nexus at system level. This paper presents the applicability of resilience.io platform across water, energy and waste sectors (including food and agricultural waste) with focus on waste-to-energy pathway, aiming to establish the optimal FEW2 nexus base...

Soil is a dynamic system that serves a wide range of functions supporting human activities and ecosystems. The extent of heavy metal soil contamination worldwide is evident. Phytoremediation is a strategy that takes advantage of natural metabolic and transport processes of plants for soil remediation. As a green alternative to traditional remediati...

Coal-fired power plants are the most common form of power generation in many regions, which continuously produce waste heat and hydrogen chloride (HCl) flue gas. To address this issue, a novel Cu-Cl hydrogen production cycle is modeled to recycle industrial waste heat and exhaust HCl and to produce hydrogen, realizing the waste-to-hydrogen (WtH) pr...

It is critical for reliable infrastructure planning to address the Food-Energy-Water-Waste (FEW2) nexus at system level. This paper presents the applicability of the systematic modelling platform resilience.io across water, energy and waste sectors with focus on waste-to-energy pathway, aiming to establish the optimal FEW2 nexus based on economic a...

Emerging digital technologies and data advances (e.g. smart machinery, remote sensing) not only enable Agriculture 4.0 to envisage interconnected agro-ecosystems and precision agriculture but also demand responsive decision-making. This study presents a mathematical optimisation model to bring real-time data and information to precision decision-su...

To enable a more sustainable wastewater treatment processes, a transition towards resource recovery methods that have minimal environmental impact while being financially viable is imperative. Phosphorus (P) is a finite resource that is being discharged into the aqueous environment in excessive quantities. As such, understanding the financial and e...

The expanding population and rapid urbanisation, in particular in the Global South, are leading to global challenges on resource supply stress and rising waste generation. A transformation to resource-circular systems and sustainable recovery of carbon-containing and nutrient-rich waste offers a way to tackle such challenges. Eco-industrial parks h...

The Front Cover shows modelling research on the co‐polymerisation of waste‐sourced limonene oxide with CO2 to produce poly(limonene carbonate), which offers a sustainable pathway to achieve carbon capture and utilisation. A computational approach to process design was integrated with sustainability evaluation to model this synthetic pathway and ide...

Invited for this month's cover picture is the group of Dr Miao Guo from Department of Chemical Engineering at the Imperial College London (UK). The cover picture shows modelling research on the co‐polymerisation of waste‐sourced limonene oxide with CO2 to produce poly(limonene carbonate), which offers a sustainable pathway to achieve carbon capture...

Biomass resources offer a very promising alternative to fossil fuels for the sustainable production of electricity, fuels and chemicals. Nevertheless, the problem of deciding on the best use of biomass is highly complex, as many potential feedstocks and conversion pathways exist, each one displaying different economic and environmental performances...

Poly(limonene carbonate) (PLC) has been highlighted as an attractive substitute to petroleum derived plastics, due to its utilisation of CO2 and bio‐based limonene as feedstocks, offering an effective carbon capture and utilisation pathway. Our study investigates the techno‐economic viability and environmental sustainability of a novel process to p...

Biomass fast pyrolysis is potentially one of the cheapest routes toward renewable liquid fuels. Its commercialization, however, poses a multi-scale challenge, which starts with the characterization of feedstock, products and reaction intermediates at molecular scales, and continues with understanding the complex reaction network taking place in dif...

This paper studies the design and management of distributed energy systems incorporating residential, commercial and industrial users. A hierarchical framework is first proposed for the energy demand side management through peer-to-peer exchange of information and energy in the real-time market. Smart contracts guaranteed by blockchain technologies...

The rigid cell wall and low carbohydrate content of Taihu algae inhibit its application for hydrogen generation by anaerobic digestion (AD). In this study, algae was co-digested with food waste (FW) in order to evaluate the influence of dried/wet condition and different mixing ratios on the digestion performance, where the dried algae (DA) showed a...

Infrastructure and services within urban areas of developed countries have established reliable definitions of resilience and its dependence on various factors as an important pathway for achieving sustainability in these energy systems. However, the assessment, design, building and maintenance of power systems situated in rural areas in emerging e...

The management of energy supply and demand is becoming more challenging, especially in regions where the demand continues to grow rapidly and more intermittent renewable supply sources are added to the energy infrastructure. In this context, Demand Side Management (DSM) can be employed to align supply and demand and improve reliability of the syste...

Hydrogen generation from food waste by dry anaerobic digestion was investigated, where different TS (total solid) contents (20%, 22%, 24%, 27%, and 30%) of the reaction system were compared, and the optimal TS was found to be 22%. The cumulative hydrogen yield began to decrease after 1.5 days, indicating a hydrogen consumption phenomenon in the rea...