Home - KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
Dr. Alessandro Blasi is a postdoctoral researcher at ENEA - Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and the Environment (Energy Technologies and Renewable Sources Department). He specializes in the field of energy from renewable sources and the energetic exploitation of biomass. Dr. Blasi holds a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering and has a keen interest in biofuel synthesis, the decarbonization process of the automotive sector, and gasification of biomass for hydrogen-rich gas and chemicals. His research work has been published in prestigious journals, providing valuable insights to the field, and he holds a patent for an innovative configuration for biodiesel synthesis. Furthermore, Dr. Blasi serves as a Contract Professor for the university courses "Energy from Renewable Sources" and "Environmental Technical Physics" in the degree course of Land and Environmental Engineering at the University of Calabria. Driven by a passion for discovery, Dr. Blasi is dedicated to advancing scientific knowledge in the field of BioEnergy, Biomass, and BioFuel.
Dr. Emine Kayahan is a Chemical Engineer. She earned her MSc and BSc at Middle East Technical University in Turkey, and her PhD at KU Leuven in Belgium. She has published several articles both during her MSc and during her PhD. She has recently been awarded two prestigious postdoctoral fellowship grants: Marie Sklodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship at TU Delft and FWO Postdoctoral Fellowship at KU Leuven. Her core interests lie in intensification and scale-up of sustainable processes in several fields including biotechnology, photochemistry and carbon capture. She specifically focus on light-driven multiphase processes. She models transport phenomena to design sustainable, cheaper and energy-efficient reactors. Then, she optimizes their performance with a careful selection of operational parameters. Her main achievements were as follows: By her photobioreactor design for H2 production, she decreased the land area to illuminated area ratio five times compared to other literature studies. In her work on an aerosol photoreactor, she showed that both mass and photon transfer limitations were overcome. With this photoreactor, the reaction time of a photosulfoxidation reaction was decreased from an hour to under 15 s. She found a novel way of calculating radiant fields in a scattering media with strong forward scattering. The model is much simpler than other models in the literature but it has a similar accuracy. With a careful selection of operational parameters, she was able to increase mass transfer coefficient of CO2 absorption into monoethanolamine solution tenfold compared to literature values, which might lead to 3-10 fold decrease in CO2 capture costs. During her postdoctoral studies, she will be working on the intensification of light-driven wastewater treatment by using phototrophic microorganisms together with aerobic sludge granules.