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Dr. Hans van Leeuwen. Photo Credit: Bob Elbert.
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It all began with a boy and his interest in microorganisms and fungi. Dr. Hans van Leeuwen, president of MycoInnovations and Professor of Environmental and Biological Engineering at Iowa State Univ., was infatuated with these small intricate organisms at a young age, brewing beer and wine, and making cheese and yogurt during his school years. He still eats his homemade yogurt every morning for breakfast. Soon this hobby turned into major innovations that can be used around the world, with the hopes of making the world a cleaner and healthier place.
Over the years, van Leeuwen has invented many different processes that help benefit humanity and the environment. From water purification, to creating food and animal feed from waste, to making the purest alcohol ever, van Leeuwen’s mark has been left on society and throughout the world.
Van Leeuwen’s first claim to fame is his work on water reclamation, which is making pure drinking water out of domestic wastewater. Dr. van Leeuwen used a microbial process to extend the life of activated carbon within this innovation. He developed a process of ozonation in water reclamation to make organic substances more biodegradable. This process stimulates biological activity on the granular activated carbon and enhances the organic removal and extends the useful life of the activated carbon by at least 7 times. This cuts deeply into the high cost and energy use for reactivation. This process is currently used in the 6 million gal/day Goreangab Water 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.
His second claim to fame deals with ships’ ballast water treatment. Ships need ballast water when they don’t carry cargo. This maintains their depths so the ships do not become unstable. 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. These pests cause billions of dollars a year in the U.S. in removal maintenance. Van Leeuwen developed a process in which the ballast water can be treated with ozone to kill the pests and minimize environmental disturbance. With his process, no ozone and no harmful byproducts are released. This process had been introduced on the Tonsina (a tanker on the West Coast) and the Prince William Sound (a tanker based in Alaska). The process is also being commercialized in South Korea.
For years, researchers have dreamed of a better, purer vodka. Van Leeuwen is now applying his third claim to fame on purifying ethyl alcohol with ozone and activated carbon. His MellO3z process makes it possible. 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 within this process, removing almost all of the impurities from ethanol. The advantage of this process is deeper than creating a purer vodka, the process is also much less expensive than the typical distillation processes used to purify alcohol.
Van Leeuwen’s two most recent innovations both received R&D Magazine R&D 100 Awards, the first in 2008 and the second in 2009. The first of the two, the MycoMax process, works by cultivating fungi on leftovers from ethanol fermentation and distillation to create a high quality animal feed. It is van Leeuwen’s hope that his MycoMax process will be used to feed the hungry in the third world, because the cultivated fungi could provide malnourished people in these countries the amino acids they are lacking within their daily diets. 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.
The second of the two innovations is the Mycofuel process, the most recent R&D 100 award winner. Within the Mycofuel process, van Leeuwen uses a two-stage bioconversion process with diverse fungal species to make biofuel or bio-oil. By using crop or forestry waste materials, and pretreating with a physical-chemical process involving aqueous ammonia pretreatment and ultrasonification, a new, greener version of biofuel may be born. This innovation is intended 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.