Annual review of chemical and biomolecular engineering最新文献

Tissue engineering aims to restore, maintain, or improve damaged tissues through the use of polymer scaffolds that support cellular growth and regeneration. Copolymerization enables the fine-tuning of thermal, structural, and mechanical polymer properties, facilitating scaffold fabrication via techniques like electrospinning and 3D printing. Functionalization and bioconjugation approaches, including thiol-ene click chemistry, allow for targeted surface modification without altering bulk properties, improving interaction with biological environments and enhancing the specificity and functionality of polyester-based scaffolds. This review highlights the central role of polymer reaction engineering in advancing aliphatic polyesters for tissue engineering, focusing on recent innovations in synthetic strategies and functionalization techniques that expand their applicability in regenerative medicine.

The conversion of CO₂ into fuels and chemicals requires significant energy input to break C-O bonds and create C-C and C-H bonds. This review explores the energy and capital barriers to CO₂ utilization, using ethylene production as a case study by comparing CO₂ electroreduction with other carbon mitigation options, including carbon capture and sequestration. The world's energy and capital resources are limited-scarce, in the parlance of economics-and choosing to use them to implement one path to decarbonization displaces other options for decarbonization or other priorities. These opportunity costs are significant and should not be ignored. Instead of breaking the C-O bonds in CO₂ to produce chemicals and fuels, society should prioritize the higher CO₂ mitigation efficiencies of alternative approaches, such as carbon capture and sequestration, new process and catalyst technologies for key molecules, and capital-efficient hydrogen production.

The phase diagram of colloidal systems strongly depends on the nature of interparticle interactions, which reflect the physical mechanisms that stabilize the particles in the medium. In systems with dominant short-range attractions, where interactions act over distances much shorter than the particle diameter, the extended law of corresponding states asserts that an interaction potential can be described by three key parameters: effective diameter, interaction strength, and second virial coefficient. If these parameters are the same, then different systems exhibit identical phase behavior, structure, and dynamics. In this review, we outline the origin and formulation of this law and the evidence that supports it. We further examine its applicability to protein solutions near liquid-liquid phase separation and to colloidal systems with short-range attraction and long-range repulsion, exploring the possibility of a universal phase diagram and extending its relevance for understanding the nature of these complex fluids.

The emergence of the United States as the leading global producer of oil and gas has driven increased interest in the greenhouse gas emissions from US energy supply chains. Methane emissions are a major portion of these greenhouse gas emissions, and the spatial and temporal patterns of methane emissions from oil and gas sources are complex. A wide variety of measurement and modeling approaches for estimating methane emissions from US oil and gas supply chains have emerged over the last decade, and this review summarizes their current status and prospects for improvement. Although no single measurement method or modeling approach will be successful in accurately characterizing all emissions, the integration of multi-scale measurement and modeling approaches can provide accurate and comprehensive estimates of emissions.

Irreversible electroporation (IRE) is a nonthermally mediated tissue ablation modality that makes use of short pulsed electric fields to destroy cancerous lesions in situ. In the past two decades, IRE has established itself not only as an effective means to ablate small, unresectable tumor masses but also as a tool particularly qualified to modulate the tumor microenvironment in a way that dismantles pathways of cancer immunosuppression and permits the development of a systemic antitumor immune response. However, despite its immune-stimulating tendencies, for most cancers conventional IRE alone is insufficient to establish an immune response robust enough to fully eliminate disseminated disease and prevent recurrence. Here, we describe the current understanding of the histological and immunological effects of IRE, as well as recent efforts to optimize IRE parameters and develop rational combination therapies to increase the efficacy of the resulting immune response.

The Savannah River Site has been successfully processing and immobilizing nuclear waste since 1996. However, recent developments in both the scientific understanding of chemical principles and the engineering of immobilizing nuclear-waste systems demand a review of the state of the art. These recent advances have significance to other locations that immobilize nuclear waste. The subject matter of this review may find special applicability to chemical engineers interested in hazardous chemical processes (such as processing toxic and radioactive nuclear waste) and to those in the nuclear industry curious about current research in nuclear-waste processing at a site that has eclipsed the quarter-century mark of large-scale (136 million L total) nuclear-waste processing.

Given their hydrophilic nature, hydrogels have shown great potential as wound dressing materials. However, traditional hydrogel dressing materials are static and do not adapt to dynamic wound environments, which in turn limits their wound healing efficacy. Introducing dynamic covalent chemistries can be an effective strategy to improve hydrogel properties for effective wound healing, such as shape adaptability, stimuli responsiveness, self-healing capability, and antibacterial properties. We discuss the properties and chemistries of dynamic covalent bonds for wound healing. We critically analyze the advances of dynamic covalent hydrogels for wound healing and further propose new dynamic covalent chemistries for wound healing.

In recent years, mechanochemistry has imposed itself as a novel promising chemical tool to bridge the gap between polymer physics and continuum mechanics in soft materials. The suitable incorporation of force-sensitive molecules (mechanophores) in load-bearing positions in soft (entropic) polymer networks and in linear chains has provided a tool to detect stresses and bond scission in 2D and 3D through the intensity of an optical signal. We review recent results linking the optical signal detected upon mechanophore activation with the applied mechanical load. Recent investigations have addressed critical questions, such as detecting and quantifying stress fields and measuring quantitative damage by bond scission in diverse cases, including failure in uniaxial tension, crack propagation in continuous loading, cyclic fatigue, or crack initiation in uniaxial and triaxial tension. We also discuss the requirements to go from simple imaging to quantitative detection, enabling comparisons between different materials and the calibration of continuum mechanics models. In ideal cases, the optical signal provides highly sensitive information on the size and intensity of damage zones in front of cracks-regions that would otherwise be undetectable.

This review focuses on how the cavitation mechanism in the snapping shrimp can be explored to intensify various chemical engineering applications. Effective bubble collapse can lead to hot spot formation, increased transport coefficients (momentum, heat, and mass), and enhanced interfacial area and also results in the formation of highly reactive radicals. Cavitation's ability to induce rapid micromixing, enhance mass transfer, and facilitate nucleophilic chemical reactions can find applications in various industries. An overview of cavitation applications, reactors used for cavitation, effects of operating parameters, and conclusions drawn from the studies so far is presented. Cavitation provides significant benefits for applications in synthesis reactions, wastewater treatment, food processing, emulsification, extraction, and crystallization. Learnings from snapping shrimp can be translated into process intensification of physicochemical and biological transformations in chemical engineering by harnessing these cavitational effects.