Who is the woman leading this innovation?

Debora Fino is leading this innovation, she is a full professor in the Chemical Plant Design - Environmental and Energy fields at Politecnico di Torino

About the innovator

The efforts required in the technology of PSA developed within BioRoburplus project, bridging fundamental scientific advances for the performance improvement of components with the testing of integrated units at TRL 6 level are provided by a multidisciplinary partnership including chemists, material scientists, physicists and a number of engineers working closely together on this short-term applied research and innovation arena.
The Researchers are well balanced in order to cover all promising development opportunities with no overlapping or IPR problems. The intensive past pre-existing activities of all researchers involved in the field (we worked tighter in previous EU funded project, Biorobur) provides them with the essential pre-existing facilities and expertise made available to the project.

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What is the innovation

The most innovative technology developed and marketable within Bioroburplus project is a well-stablished and reliable process for the hydrogen purification from a syngas mixture. Within this context, multi-bed configurations and operating protocols have been studied, in order to identify the most promising process route for a BioRoburplus PSA unit.
A PSA separation process is a gas-solid system operated in cycles where multi-fixed bed columns are packed with an appropriate adsorbent (solid phase) that preferentially adsorbs one or more components from a gas mixture. The PSA process works at basically constant temperature and uses the effect of alternating pressure and partial pressure to perform adsorption and desorption. Since heating or cooling is not required, short cycles within the range of minutes are achieved. Changes in temperature are caused only by the heat of adsorption and desorption and by depressurization. The process has four basic process steps:
•Adsorption
•Depressurization
•Regeneration
•Repressurization
To finish, based on the experimental results, the most promising strategy for BioRoburplus application is the fast cycle PSA in order to ensure reliability, simple operation, minimal footprint, and the ability to produce the most cost-effective ultra-high purity.

Out of the lab. Into the market

The Exploitation Steering Committee was established at the beginning of the project to decide on the exploitation policy of the project results. This Committee is mainly composed by the industrial partners and its main task is the design of the step-by-step promotion of the technology.The Exploitation, Innovation and IPR Manager for the project, chairing the Exploitation Steering Committee is Dr. Massimiliano Antonini from HST, owing to his strong technical and marketing knowledge of industrial products and appliances in the field, derived from more than a decade of professional experience. Besides, promoting creativity is a key issue in the company he is manager of. His role is to co-ordinate all the aspects that have an influence on the exploitation of the results. For this purpose, the exploitation manager is effectively co-operating with technical and commercial staff of all the partners. He is coordinating all exploitation related issues within the Consortium (patents, licenses, diffusion activities, etc.) and is also in charge of coordinating possible negotiations concerning exploitation issues between the Consortium and external parties. 

Benefits of participation in Horizon 2020

It is always a bit embarrassing to judge myself and how I lead the research team, but the following skills regarding myself and the achievements might be consistent signs of my growing attitude as a woman research leader that can offer the team the exact propulsion to achieve ambitious goals:
• My production of scientific articles is very high (more than 240 papers in 15 years) and located primarily on ISI journals;
• the key discoveries standing at the grounds of the scientific articles already published are as innovative and un¬conventional as characterised by a very wide socio-economic impact.
• The past years have seen an evolution not only in my career (full professorship), but also in my attitude to lead a research group since I was directly responsible of the activities of more than 20 PhD students.
• Alongside with this in the past years I have been successful in raising funds for research projects from either public institutions (nowadays I'm coordinating 2 H2020 projects) or private enterprises. My peculiar attitude in fund raising, also based on my reputation as a researcher, will be helpful in the future to render the Bioroburplus achievements exploitable and  sustainable not only from a scientific and social standpoint but also from a marketing and practical one.

This innovation was funded via H2020 project BIOROBURplus

Team behind the innovation

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