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Dr. Hans van Leeuwen. Image courtesy of Bob Elbert.
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From water purification methods, to creating food and animal feed from waste, to making the purest alcohol ever, van Leeuwen has left his mark on society and throughout the world.
It all started with a boy and his interest in microorganisms. Dr. Hans van Leeuwen, president of MycoInnovations, Ames, Iowa, and Professor of Environmental and Biological Engineering at Iowa State Univ., was infatuated with beneficial microbes at a young age, brewing beer and wine, and making cheese and yogurt during his school years. “I have been making yogurt throughout my life—almost every day. I always eat fresh yogurt for breakfast. It is quite delicious, nutritious, and addictive,” says van Leeuwen.
Through this interest, van Leeuwen realized that for his first professional job, he wanted to work with microbial processes. He also had great interest in using microorganisms in work that dealt with purifying wastewater. From his upbringing in South Africa, he also felt a need to help the underprivileged in third world countries through his work. Currently, his innovations achieve both. And, that is why Hans van Leeuwen has been selected as R&D Magazine's 2009 Innovator of the Year.
However, it took van Leeuwen a lot of hard work to get where he is now. Van Leeuwen claims the achievement that made him most proud was when he got his bachelor's degree in chemical engineering from the Univ. of Pretoria. “The reason I say receiving my B.S. filled me with the greatest pride is because it took me 10 years to get it,” says van Leeuwen.
While going to college part-time, van Leeuwen had various businesses on the side. “I had a fiberglass business and a flower export business,” he says. He jokingly laughed, “I do not think I was a good university student. Being honest, I must have been a pain in the neck to my professors with all of my outside activities that I worked on. However, later in my research years that changed when I began to focus on projects of great interest to me.”
Receiving his chemical engineering degree was the first step toward his road to his many innovations. And, through pushing and encouragement from his mother, van Leeuwen completed both his master of engineering in Water Utilization Engineering and his doctorate of engineering. His wife, Marina, has been inspirational and supportive for the latter, too. Even though he was convinced at a young age that working with fungi and microbes was what he wanted to make his career, van Leeuwen also thanks a now-deceased colleague, Professor W.A. (Bill) Pretorius, who according to van Leeuwen, “had been [his] mentor and taught him a lot.”
Over the years, van Leeuwen has invented many processes that help benefit humanity and the environment. From water purification methods, to creating food and animal feed from waste, to making the purest alcohol ever, van Leeuwen’s mark—and love for his interest/work—has been left on society and throughout the world.
Van Leeuwen’s first major innovation was in the work he did on water reclamation, which is making drinking water out of community wastewater. Van Leeuwen used a microbial process to extend the life of activated carbon with this innovation. “My process of using ozonation in water reclamation makes organic substances more biodegradable,” says van Leeuwen. This process stimulates biological activity on the granular activated carbon and enhances the organic removal, while also extending the “useful life” of the activated carbon by at least 7 times.
“The breakthrough was the activated carbon,” van Leeuwen claims. “This process was a breakthrough as it makes significant improvements in the terms of cost and energy,” he says. Currently, this process is used in the 6 million gal/day Goreangab Walter Reclamation Plant in Windhoek, Namibia, to supply part of the city’s drinking water needs. It also is incorporated in the South Caboolture Water Reclamation plant in Caboolture, Queensland, Australia.
“My second claim to fame was working on ships ballast water treatment,” says van Leeuwen. “Ships need ballast water when they don’t have a cargo to maintain their depths so the propeller doesn’t stick out, or the ship becomes unstable,” he explains. There may come a point where some ships can break apart because they don’t have a balance between the water on board and the water outside. However, ballast water is an easy way for foreign species to be introduced into whatever harbor the water will be discharged. The best known case study is the introduction, by shipping, of zebra mussels into the Great Lakes. “This ends up costing billions of dollars a year in the U.S. in removal and maintenance and seriously disturbing the ecosystem,” says van Leeuwen. “We have developed a process with ozonation where the water can be treated with ozone to kill these pests. This is done in way that minimizes environmental disturbance since there is a 100% utilization of the ozone used in the process." This work was done in collaboration with ex-students Dr. Darren Oemcke and Jake Perrins and Professors Bill Cooper of the University of California, Irvine; and Russ Herwig of the University of Washington, Seattle.
Van Leeuwen’s design for the work on ships ballast water allows for the ozone to dissolve rapidly, which is the cause of the 100% use of ozone. “If the ozone dissolved slowly in the process, rather than rapidly, you would end up with a situation where there would be a build-up of harmful chemicals being released into the water, causing a huge environmental impact. The rapid system that I designed avoids this and makes for an extremely environmentally friendly approach,” he states. This process has been introduced in collaboration with Richard Mueller of Netsco, Cleveland, Oh., and Nutech-O3, Arlington, Va., on the Tonsina and the Prince William Sound (tankers operating between Alaska and major west-coast cities). The process is also being commercialized in South Korea.
A better vodka
For years connoisseurs have dreamed of a better, purer vodka. Van Leeuwen developed the MellO3z process of purifying ethyl alcohol with ozone and activated carbon. When using ozonation at a level and rate to selectively oxidize some of the unwanted substances in the alcohol—undesirable tastes and odors—are abolished, making the product much more mellow. Ozonolysis byproducts are removed by adsorption on activated carbon in this process, removing almost all impurities from ethanol. This was developed with Rick Wood and Drs. Jacek Koziel and Lingshuang Cai of Iowa State Univ. “Instead of using a typical, expensive distillation process, you could use our process,” says Van Leeuwen, “it is a great way to reach a higher quality vodka.” This process could also be used to purify fuel-grade ethanol to food-grade. Television comedian Jay Leno has expressed a view that this was an excellent idea as the shortage in booze is much greater than in fuel.
Fungi for the world
Van Leeuwen’s next innovations, both winners of R&D Magazine’s R&D 100 Awards, the first in 2008 and the second in 2009, took a more humanitarian and eco-friendly approach. Growing up in South Africa, van Leeuwen was surrounded by an interesting mix of first and third world technology and lifestyles. It may have been this impact which led to his creation of fungal processes. Van Leeuwen’s MycoMax process works by cultivating microbial filamentous fungi on leftovers from ethanol fermentation and distillation to create a high quality animal feed. Initial work in this area was done with ex-student, now Professor Bo Jin at the University of Adelaide, South Australia. “It is my hope, or something that I still dream of, that my MycoMax process will feed the hungry in the third world,” claims Van Leeuwen.
“This process could provide hundreds of millions of people the amino acids they are lacking in their day-to-day diets, which are causing nutritional imbalances and death of so many people, especially young children,” continues Van Leeuwen. “The MycoMax fungal process is very environmentally friendly because the alternative to this is evaporating the water, which uses a lot more energy,” says Van Leeuwen. It is van Leeuwen’s hope that his process of converting organic wastes in thin stillage from corn-to-ethanol processes into high-protein fungal biomass, could make an environmentally friendly improvement in world happiness and health. Other collaborators on this work were (soon Dr.) Mary Rasmussen, Dr. Anthony L Pometto III (now with Clemson) and Dr. Samir Khanal (now at the University of Hawaii, Manoa.)
However, van Leeuwen warns that the cultivation of the fungi that he uses within his processes is not as easy as it may sound. He compares his cultivation process to farming, except that this is done at jet speed—only days instead of months. When a farmer wants to grow a certain plant, that plant will come into competition with unwanted plants or conditions around it. To cultivate the plant, a farmer might have to cultivate the land by pulling weeds or plowing, or using selective weed killer to kill intruders around the plant, so the farmer will be left with the plant they want. The farmer creates the cultivation conditions that are conducive to his plant. The same goes for fungi/microorganisms; we need to remove the direct competitors. “Even in our fungal processes, this is not a pure fungal culture. There is no way of getting other organisms out, except for outcompeting them. This is achieved in the MycoMax process by maintaining a low enough pH, and some other environmental conditions of growth that favor the fungi. This way they out-compete bacteria, which makes the process successful,” says Van Leeuwen.
Van Leeuwen’s latest claim to fame, is his 2009 R&D 100 Award winner, the Mycofuel process. Within the Mycofuel process, van Leeuwen uses a two-stage bioconversion process with diverse fungal species to make bio-oil or biofuel. “Here we can take various biological materials, such as woody leftover from plants, crop residues such as corn husks, forestry wastes or grasses, and convert them into biofuel,” says van Leeuwen. By using this crop of forestry waste materials, and pretreating with a physical-chemical process involving aqueous ammonia pretreatment and ultrasonication, a new, greener version of biofuel may be born. “This process, in my opinion, will be a better process than making ethanol from these plant materials,” states van Leeuwen. The innovation intending to make biofuel production more sustainable by creating a biodiesel that has a 40% higher specific energy content than ethanol. The Mycofuel created from the process is also more readily separated from water than ethanol, which helps create a greener and more cost-effective process. This work was done in collaboration with colleagues at Iowa State University: Drs. David Grewell, Tae Hyun Kim, Sam Beattie and John Verkade.
Van Leeuwen’s innovations do not end there. He says he will continue his work with fungal processes, improve upon his achievements, and continue making a difference by putting research with microorganisms on the map, making the world a better place for all its inhabitants.
Published in R & D magazine: Vol. 51, No. 7, December, 2009, pp.10-11.