Saving Water in Desert Lands

Water harvesting represents a huge problem in many world places where its availability is limited. In particular, agricultural practices can consumes up to the 83% of the overall available fresh water. In this context, the choice of the opportune irrigation system and soil conditioner is pivotal for the sustainability of a production.

Here we are facing a challenging issue: how to choose the best combination between two different and hardly related factors?

One more time, Design of Experiments can help to solve our problem. In fact, when for exploratory reasons, two factors which include one hard to change (irrigation system) are considered, a special factorial design, named split plot design, can be employed.

More detailed information about this topic are available in our last open access paper by clicking here.

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Waste Cooking Oils as Raw Material

Waste Cooking Oils (WCOs) pertain to the family of the Used Vegetable Oils (UVOs) are considered wastes dangerous for the environment. Their production is massive and it is exponentially growing. As WCOs are mostly derived by frying processes, they are present as waste everywhere in our planet. Collection , disposal and recycling of WCOs is very important in order to reduce in part the impact of human activity on the environment. I have been dedicating some time to specific research activity about the recycling of this waste, studying innovative ways for convert it in valuable raw material for industries. Although WCOs have been recycled mostly for bio-diesel production, they can be exploited for produce bio-lubricants, asphalt binders, bio-plasticizers, animal feed, green-solvents, and more (see “ Innovative application of waste cooking oil as raw material”, https://doi.org/10.1177/0036850419854252 ). Recently, we explored in particular the employment of recycled WCO...

Degumming of Waste Cooking Oils

With the term "degumming" is usually described an important step in the purification of edible vegetable oils. It consists in washing the crude oil with water and is aimed to remove phospholipids and waxes from the unrefined oil. For more informations click here . Why we should apply this treatment to Waste Cooking Oils (WCOs) which don't contain waxes or phospholipids? It was 2012 when I proposed for the first time to degum WCOs. In the following years I had the possibility to take part to three main studies about the effect of water treatment on the composition or WCOs. Thanks to some collaborations between the Politecnico di Milano and the University of Sassari, we could monitor the volatile fraction of samples of WCO prior and after several different water treatments. We found that water is able to remove selected chemicals and that is possible to modulate this effect by acting on the pH and temperature ( click here to be redirected to the paper ). Nev...

Band Gap Energy of Molten Salts

I recently thought to solve a important issue which concerns organic molten salts. Molten salts composed by an organic salt and at least one hydrogen-bond donor showed special physical and chemical characteristics at the eutectic molar ratio. Many of these systems have been addressed as Deep Eutectic Solvents ( DESs ). Not all the molten aìsalts are DES, and in order to estabilish is a substance is a DES, would be necessary to construct a phase diagram. As many of you can immagine, this is not easy and not always possible. Now consider the band gap energy of a material. It can be defined as the energy gap between the conduction and the valence bands. The band gap energy can be easily estimated from the UV-VIS spectrum of the material by a graphic methodology known as the Tauc’s plot. What happen if you eventually discover that some organic molten salts exhibit not only a drastic drop of the melting point, but also a drop of the band gap energy at the eutectic composition? Y...

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