Wen Yi Chia

University of Nottingham, Malaysia Campus | nottingham · Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering

The growing global demand for food has exposed the unsustainable nature of our current food system, necessitating a transition towards a more sustainable model. This sustainable system should emulate natural processes, operating in a circular manner where the output of one phase serves as the input for the next. This concept is known as the circula...

The poultry industry in Vietnam is vulnerable to many viral diseases. Since antibiotics and vaccination provide inadequate protection, it will be beneficial to have alternative immunostimulants to boost non-specific immunity in poultry. Chicken interferon-alpha (ChIFNα) has been described previously with antiviral activity against many pathogens. T...

Microplastics are the small fragments of the plastic molecules which find their applications in various routine products such as beauty products. Later, it was realized that it has several toxic effects on marine and terrestrial organisms. This review is an approach in understanding the microplastics, their origin, dispersal in the aquatic system,...

Production and extraction systems of algal protein and handling process of functional food ingredients need to control several parameters such as temperature, pH, intensity, and turbidity. Many researchers have investigated the Internet of Things (IoT) approach for enhancing the yield of microalgae biomass and machine learning for identifying and c...

Future sustainable approach of bioenergy production that uses microalgae–bacteria consortium to produce bioelectricity and biofuel for industrial and daily activities.

Vast amounts of plastic waste are causing serious environmental issues and urge to develop of new remediation methods. The aim of the study is to determine the role of (nitric acid), organic (starch addition), and biological (Pseudomonas aeruginosa) soil amendments on the degradation of Polyethylene (PE) and phytotoxic assessment for the growth of...

Waste cooking oil (WCO) is largely generated and disposed into the environment, especially in China and India, making it one of the largest pollutants in the environment. The disposal of high loads of WCO is causing many detrimental environmental problems, including blockages in the sewer, hindrance of sewage pretreatment at wastewater treatment pl...

In the era of industrialization, the issues of greenhouse effect and depletion of unrenewable fossil fuels contributed to analyzing the potential of third-generation feedstock (microalgae) for biodiesel production owing to the cost-effectiveness, high lipid properties, and lesser carbon emission. In the conventional transesterification process, lip...

The Industrial Revolution 4.0 (IR 4.0) holds the opportunity to improve the efficiency of managing solid waste through digital and machinery applications, effectively eliminating, recovering, and repurposing waste. This research aims to discover and review the potential of current technologies encompassing innovative Industry 4.0 designs for solid...

The growing human population has put significant pressure on the market for food sources and nutritional supplements, necessitating careful consideration of high costs, supply, and long-term sustainability. The same is true for the biorefinery of carotenoids where the high extraction costs significantly raise the end-product costs. Many brown seawe...

Background Microalgae have been a hot research topic due to their various biorefinery applications, particularly microalgae as potential alternative nutraceuticals and supplements have a large and rapidly growing market. However, the commercial production is limited due to high processing cost, low efficiency, and scale up of biomass production. O...

Raw mushroom waste has been an enormous solid waste, not only causing a huge cut on profit margin of mushroom industries but also leading to environmental pollution. Unfortunately, the current utilization methods, such as pharmaceutical extractions, are unable to keep up with the waste generation rate due to the large-scale mushroom production. Yet...

Agriculture farms such as crop, aquaculture and livestock have begun the implementation of Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI) technology in improving their productivity and product quality. However, microalgae farming which requires precise monitoring, controlling and predicting the growth of microalgae biomass has yet to inc...

The increase in worldwide vegetable oil consumption has produced a large increase in hazardous waste cooking oil (WCO) production. The improper disposal of WCO has been a significant problem from both an environmental and economic perspective. Therefore, it is advantageous to transform WCOs into valuable products efficiently and effectively in orde...

The current scenario of environment urgently needs alternative biologically synthesized fuels, value-added products, and preparation of catalyst to create a pollution free environment. Usually, several methods are available for the synthesis of various commodities from many biological resources. Microwave-assisted pyrolysis (MAP) is a relatively ne...

The ever-growing human population has resulted in the expansion of agricultural activity; evident by the deforestation of rainfoamrests as a means of acquiring fertile land for crops. The crops and fruits produced by such means should be utilized completely; however, there are still losses and under-exploitation of these produces which has resulted...

Microalgal biomass produced from the inexpensive nutrient medium is a potential raw source for manufacturing different essential products covering a broad spectrum of applications. In this study, six separate microalgal strains were isolated from lake freshwater and screened based on their growth and biomass productivity in 10% raw dairy wastewater...

The remarkable journey of progression of mankind has created various impacts in the form of polluted environment, amassed heavy metals and depleting resources. This alarming situation demands sustainable energy resources and approaches to deal with these environmental hazards and power deficit. Pyrolysis and co-pyrolysis address both energy and env...

Fuel cells (FCs) are a chemical fuel device which can directly convert chemical energy into electrical energy, also known as electrochemical generator. Proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs) are one of the most appealing FC systems that have been broadly developed in recent years. Due to the poor conductivity of electrolyte membrane used in t...

Waste cooking oil (WCO) is considered as one of the hazardous wastes because improper disposal of WCO can cause significant environmental problems such as blockages of drains and sewers as well as water or soil pollution. In this review, the physical and chemical properties of WCO are evaluated along with its regulations and policies in different c...

Emerging contaminants (ECs) in wastewater have recently attracted the attention of researchers as they pose significant risks to human health and wildlife. This paper presents the state-of-art technologies used to remove ECs from wastewater through a comprehensive review. It also highlights the challenges faced by existing EC removal technologies i...

The work aimed to study the potential in producing a system with high microalgal protein recovery and separation by utilizing a one-step or integrated downstream process. This in turn enables green biorefinery of protein, contributing to circular bioeconomy whereby less energy, labor, and cost are required for the process. By utilizing electric thr...

Palm oil plays a vital role as edible vegetable oil for daily human consumption. However, the process technologies and the quality of palm oil produced have remained stagnant for the past decades. This paper reviews the latest development in the process technologies that can be applied in the palm oil milling process to improve the sustainability a...

In the recent years, microalgae have captured researchers’ attention as the alternative feedstock for various bioenergy production such as biodiesel, biohydrogen, and bioethanol. Cultivating microalgae in wastewaters to simultaneously bioremediate the nutrient-rich wastewater and maintain a high biomass yield is a more economical and environmentall...

The accumulation of conventional petroleum-based polymers has increased exponentially over the years. Therefore, algae-based biopolymer has gained interest among researchers as one of the alternative approaches in achieving a sustainable circular economy around the world. The benefits of microalgae biopolymer over other feedstock is its autotrophic...

The world at large is facing a new threat with the emergence of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Though imperceptible by the naked eye, the medical, sociological and economical implications caused by this newly discovered virus have been and will continue to be a great impediment to our lives. This health threat has already caused...

Global uptrends in palm oil industry have been observed while a vast amount of waste, particularly palm oil mill effluent (POME) which is a type of wastewater that can cause severe environmental pollution has been discharged. This has caused remarkable challenges for palm oil mills to obey the regulations of standard discharge limits, resulting in...

Acceleration of urbanization and industrialization has resulted in the drastic rise of waste generation with majority of them being biowaste. This constitutes a global challenge since conventional waste management methods (i.e., landfills) present environmental issues including greenhouse gases emissions, leachate formation and toxins release. A su...

This study demonstrated a novel approach of lipids extraction with simultaneous biofuels conversion on microalgae Chlorella sorokiniana CY-1 cultivation using waste molasses as culture medium. The lipid extraction process was based on a hybrid liquid biphasic system (HLBS) which comprises of disruptive and extractive solvents in a single system. Th...

There has been increasing attention in osmotically driven membrane processes (ODMPs), which include forward osmosis (FO) and pressure retarded osmosis (PRO). They provide a sustainable solution against water and energy scarcity issues by utilizing the osmotic pressure difference between two water bodies, feed (low salinity) and draw solution (high...

In this study, to improve the mechanical and thermal properties of curdlan film, a curdlan/nanocellulose (NC) blended film was prepared and characterized for the first time. NC was successfully prepared from microcrystalline cellulose (MCC) with NaOH/urea treatment. The particle size of NC was observed to be 70–140 nm by cryo-electron microscope (c...

The increased global demand for plastic materials has led to severe plastic waste pollution, particularly to the marine environment. This critical issue affects both sea life and human beings since microplastics can enter the food chain and cause several health impacts. Plastic recycling, chemical treatments, incineration and landfill are apparentl...

The world energy production trumped by the exhaustive utilization of fossil fuels has highlighted the importance of searching for an alternative energy source that exhibits great potential. Ongoing efforts are being implemented to resolve the challenges regarding the preliminary processes before conversion to bioenergy such as pretreatment, enzymat...

Forward osmosis (FO) and pressure-retarded osmosis (PRO) have gained attention recently as potential processes to solve water and energy scarcity problems with advantages over pressure-driven membrane processes. These processes can be designed to produce bioenergy and clean water at the same time (i.e., wastewater treatment with power generation)....