Innovation

Developing clean and renewable energy alternatives for the energy grid has been considered a priority for global sustainability. A partnership between the CNPEM and Sinochem Petróleo Brasil, with funding from EMBRAPII, contributed to this agenda by developing enzymatic strategies to produce advanced biofuels along two main lines of activity. The first involved developing a microbial platform capable of secreting high levels of an enzymatic cocktail optimized for the saccharification of sugarcane bagasse; this new cocktail demonstrated greater hydrolytic activity in sugarcane bagasse compared to a non-optimized strain.

The COVID-19 pandemic brought with it various challenges to humankind and drove the need for technologies that allow everyone to safely resume their activities; these include effective alternatives for decontaminating surfaces and objects. Using ultraviolet (UV) radiation to inactivate viruses is a well-established technique, but traditional germicidal lamps are dangerous. A window of far-UVC wavelengths has demonstrated significant antiviral and antimicrobial effects without such health risks and is being evaluated for use in disinfecting equipment.

The Brazilian Aluminum Company (Companhia Brasileira do Alumínio, CBA) signed a collaboration agreement with the CNPEM in 2020 and again in 2021 for specialized technological services to scale up its process of recovering aluminum from urban waste. These activities involved pilot-scale experiments to validate a protocol developed by the company. Different methods and experimental arrangements were used to better understand the industrial production conditions and successfully replicate the lab-scale results. According to Roberto Seno Junior, Technology Manager at CBA, the partnership with the CNPEM benefits both parties, especially for new technologies, since “the process of developing new products and solutions requires a strong connection with the market to quickly respond to demand and absorb this learning.”

In partnership with Bosch, the CNPEM worked to develop a car component to improve combustion performance. Besides the performance differentials expected from the new technology, the part was developed using materials from renewable sources, reducing its environmental impact. This addressed two major challenges: developing processes to convert the raw material from sugarcane into active, nano-structured materials with critical characteristics for the end user, and designing the part itself. The raw material was converted to obtain a product with properties resembling the state of the art in the literature, demonstrating LNNano’s experience in developing this type of nanostructured material.

The “Green Polymer Fillers” project, a partnership with the SP Pesquisa e Tecnologia Ltda company with financing from EMBRAPII, involves producing polymer additives from roasting and pyrolyzing biomass. The goal is to develop sustainable, high-performance, and low-cost polymer fillers with low environmental impact to use in composite materials to replace the raw materials traditionally used in areas including manufacturing, engineering, the construction sector, consumer goods, and the automotive sector. “For SP, this partnership with EMBRAPII/SEBRAE/CNPEM is a watershed in its R&D&I trajectory for manufacturing,” says one of the company’s partners, Lucio Christiansen.

When construction began on Sirius, no Brazilian companies offered radiation protection hutches with the specifications required for the experimental stations of this cutting-edge machine. Biotec, a small company in São José dos Campos, São Paulo, received support from FAPESP and FINEP to develop a prototype of the protection hutches that ensure safe conditions for users of this facility. The prototype was a success, and the company was hired to install the hutches at Sirius. Besides meeting this need, the company also identified new areas of activity: it already sees other ways to more broadly benefit society. One example is using the same radiation protection technology in the hutches to improve facilities where radiation therapy is used to treat patients, in both the Brazilian public health system (SUS) as well as private institutions.