Associate Professor
Dept. of Biological and Environmental Engineering
Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future (ACSF)
Lars Angenent is interested in converting organic materials with undefined mixed cultures, defined mixed cultures, or pure cultures of microbes to generate specific products, such as the energy carriers – methane; carboxylates; electric current; n-butanol. Pretreatment of the biomass may be necessary to increase the conversion rates, and therefore Lars Angenent is also interested in physical/chemical (e.g., dilute acid method), thermochemical (e.g., slow pyrolysis), and biological pretreatment steps. In regards to bioprocessing steps, Lars Angenent studies anaerobic digestion, anaerobic fermentation, bioelectrochemical systems, syngas fermentation, and ABE fermentation. Other areas of interest are biosensors and biocomputing devices that are based on bioelectrochemical systems (BESs); and photobioreactors.
For organic waste conversion into bioenergy, Lars Angenent is promoting the carboxylate platform as an important platform in biorefineries because water and nutrients must be recycled while bioenergy yields must be maximized. This platform is based on microbial conversions with undefined mixed cultures that can handle the complexity and variability of organic wastes. Therefore, Lars Angenent is interested in the microbial community dynamics in engineered systems. For this reason, his lab utilizes second-generation sequencing platforms in combination with powerful bioinformatic tools and ecology theory.
Lars Angenent in front of an upflow anaerobic sludge blanket (UASB) reactor in Baldwinsville , NY.
Lars Angenent invented a novel anaerobic bioreactor during his PhD-thesis research: