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Considering consumer behavioral norms is important to sustainable design. This Editorial discusses the need to incorporate behavioral patterns into product design and the role that the chemical engineering community can play in fostering a more informed understanding of sustainability among consumers.
Fundamental transport modeling of bipolar membranes has identified sources of inefficiencies in power-generating applications. These insights can guide the development of improved membranes, ultimately aiding in energy recovery across various electrochemical technologies.
Degradable poly(β-amino ester) (PAE) polymers can be used as a scalable alternative to microplastics in personal care products and nutrient delivery. This study demonstrates the effectiveness of PAE microparticles in skin exfoliation and nutrient protection, providing a potential eco-friendly solution to reduce microplastic pollution and its associated environmental and health impacts.
Oligonucleotide therapeutics have emerged as a promising alternative to traditional small-molecule and protein-based drugs. This Perspective discusses how chemical engineering can broaden oligonucleotide applications to extrahepatic diseases and enable larger-scale production, ultimately allowing treatment of more prevalent conditions than is currently possible.
Forward-biased bipolar membranes (FB-BPMs), which recover potential from pH gradients through ion–ion recombination, show promise for application in sustainable devices. The authors use physics-based modeling to elucidate how ion-specific phenomena dictate performance, reveal how selective ion management can mitigate energy losses and provide insights into the rational design of next-generation FB-BPMs.
This Perspective argues that early assessments of technology-market fit, as well as how the physics governing system performance evolves with scale, can de-risk technology development and accelerate deployment. The authors highlight tools and processes that can be used to assess both these factors at an early stage.
Electrochemical engineering offers a route to renewably powered CO2 capture. Now, fluorescence spectroscopy diagnostics provides a means to probe the fundamental mechanisms within these otherwise opaque systems.
In an aqueous quinone-mediated system, both pH swing and nucleophilicity swing mechanisms contribute to CO2 capture, but traditional measurement methods report only the combined contributions, without quantifying their relative contributions. Here the authors introduce thermodynamic and kinetic analyses coupled with two in situ experimental techniques to quantify the contributions of these mechanisms.
This study reports the preparation of degradable poly(β-amino ester) microparticles as a promising replacement for nondegradable microplastics in cleansing products and food fortification, demonstrating effective cleansing, toxic element removal and robust nutrient protection with efficient release.
Preventing freezing droplet accretion on surfaces is practically important, yet challenging. Leveraging the water volume expansion during the freezing process, a structured elastic surface with spring-like pillars and wetting contrast is reported, which renders the spontaneous ejection of freezing water droplets, regardless of their impacting locations.
The efficient production of high-value aromatic esters in microbial cell factories hinges on optimizing pathway specificity and resource allocation. Now, a study shows that employing both substrate tunnel engineering for enzyme specificity and dynamic metabolic regulation for resource allocation in Escherichia coli enables high-yield production of benzyl benzoate and other aromatic esters.
Biosynthesis of aromatic esters is challenged by unclear natural pathways and low efficiency. This study presents a bacterial platform for efficient production, using systematic engineering strategies including enzyme identification, reshaping enzyme tunnels and automating cellular resource allocation to enhance output.
Joseph Sang-Il Kwon explores how integrating big data with physics-based models can enhance accuracy and insights, particularly in drug discovery and solving high-dimensional problems.
Work at the systems level plays a pivotal part in driving engineering advances. In this Editorial, we discuss the role of the Analysis research article format in accelerating breakthroughs in systems engineering science.
