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Madison’s Trisha Andrew honored for energy research

Trisha Andrew, an assistant professor of chemistry at UW Madison, has been named to Forbes magazine 30 Under 30 in Energy. The list recognizes talented young innovators whose work holds potential for the energy landscape of the future.

Andrew, who joined the faculty at the start of the semester, was previously a postdoctoral fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Her energy research, which started at MIT but is continuing at UW Madison, focuses on using unique nanoscale materials to develop new types of solar cells. These solar cells, which can be as small as one hundredth the width of a single hair strand, convert solar energy into electrical energy.

Although research on these types of nanomaterials has been going on for decades, the key at this point, says Andrew, is getting these materials out into the world by making them lightweight, cheap and widespread.

Andrew is now focusing on the types of energy issues relevant to household settings rather than industrial settings. She sees value in working on energy problems that hold the potential for universal application, such as powering household electronics using solar energy captured as sunlight travels through specially selected colored molecules in a windowpane.

we trying to answer is the smaller question of how http://www.cheapjerseys11.com/ we can impact our population with technologies that aren going to last for 15 years, but will last for a year or two, which is the life of a mid range cell phone, Andrew says. of what inspires me every day is that we cheap jerseys need these devices right now. I honestly feel like we going to solve this energy crisis in some way. It may take a while, but we will do it. By Libby Dowdall.

Madison Remembers Otis Redding Crash

Musician Otis Redding was just 26 years old when his plane crashed into Madison’s Lake Monona back on December 10, 1967. Six other people were also killed in the crash and on Monday one Madison man remembered being in line for his concert on that tragic night.

Gary Knowles says he and a friend had bought their tickets for just cheap jerseys $3. They were standing in the cold outside The Factory Bar on Gorham Street waiting to get in when an employee came out with the news.

“Someone said Otis’ plane hadn’t come in and the concert would not be held that evening and they would tell us about a refund later,” Knowles said.

Knowles didn’t hear what really happened until later that night.

“To have anybody go down in Lake Monona was pretty shocking but to have a famous person go down here was really tragic,” Knowles said.

Another interesting note, Knowles says the band opening for Redding on that night 45 years ago was the Grim Reapers, a group that would go on to form the http://www.cheapjerseys11.com/ famous Rockford band Cheap Trick.

Madison invention basis for top honor in clean

A new company built to commercialize a green energy discovery at University of Wisconsin Madison earned the top honor and a check for $100,000 at this month Chicago Clean Energy Challenge.

The firm, named Hyrax Energy, is developing a process to make sugar from cellulose, the tough carbohydrate that gives structure to plants.

That sugar could be a raw material for the biofuels, chemical and plastics industries. Ethanol, a biofuel added to gasoline, consumes about 40 percent of the total American corn crop. Using cellulose would reduce pressure on the price of corn and greatly expand the range of raw materials.

The new technology was developed by company co founder Ron Raines, a professor of biochemistry and chemistry.

can take a cotton ball, which is essentially pure cellulose, and which does not dissociate in any common solvent, and drop it into this ionic liquid, and it dissolves. It like a magic trick, he says.

The starting point came in 2002, when another lab discovered that certain liquids could dissolve cellulose. That opened the door to simpler processing, says Raines. much easier to do chemistry in a solution rather than on a solid. 2009 process produced a type of molecule called a furan, but then Raines figured out how to arrest the reaction to produce glucose, a sugar that is a basic building block of chemical engineering. The process occurs in a single reaction vessel, at relatively low pressure and temperature.

The key step cheap jerseys was adding an exact amount of water to halt the reaction when the solution was essentially a soup of glucose molecules. Water locks onto the glucose molecules so they cannot reassemble into longer molecules that would difficult to process, but too much water interferes with the reaction.

published this in 2010, and the same day, http://www.cheapjerseys11.com/ it was described in The New York Times as a potential game changing way to make sugars from cellulosic biomass, non edible biomass, Raines says.

Although only small quantities of glucose have been made to date with the new process, it is extremely efficient, Raines says. 90 percent of the mass of cellulose and related molecules in corn stover [waste material left after kernels are removed] are converted into sugar molecules. We have tested, and they support the growth of microorganisms that ferment sugar into biofuel. research was funded by the Department of Energy through the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center on the Madison campus.

are thrilled to see that there is commercial interest in further developing the ionic liquids technology that was created in Great Lakes Bioenergy, says director Tim Donohue, a UW Madison professor of bacteriology. recent clean tech award to Hyrax is outside endorsement of this promising technology. cellulose rather than corn into chemical feedstock is a holy grail in the effort to convert more plant material into biofuels and other industrial chemicals.

Unlike many scientists, who are investigating biological methods to break apart cellulose, Raines focused on chemistry. enzymes that break down cellulose contain thousands of atoms, but a simple proton is enough to catalyze the reaction, he says. protons can be sourced in acids, which are cheap and easy to come by. far, the process has worked with corn stover, and other cheap or free sources of cellulose such as pine sawdust, wood and oat hulls, Raines says.

Hyrax Energy is at such an early stage of startup that it does not yet even have an office. The firm is negotiating to license the patent pending Raines technology, which has been assigned to the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.

Raines suggests the firm could move quickly once the license is signed. processes have a tendency to be much faster to scale up, because they are simple and we are really good at building chemical plants. Raines work is further evidence of the broad and deep expertise in plant material conversion and green energy at the UW Madison. The Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center has a wide portfolio of techniques for converting plant material into chemical feedstocks. WARF has a library of patents from university research available for corporate licensing.

A Madison spin off called Virent uses catalysts to make biofuel has more than 100 employees, and Raines says co founder Jim Dumesic, a UW Madison professor of chemical and biological engineering, was an in showing the potential of new methods for converting organic materials into industrial chemicals.