Four life-changing ideas that could transform the world around us have been named winners of the Royal Society of Chemistry’s tenth Emerging Technologies Competition.
Winning big at the event held on July 7 were:
- Enabling Technologies: Alivion AG - Methanol poisoning causes blindness or even death. Yet, methanol detectors for diagnosis by breath analysis or screening of beverages are not available. Here, a handheld, nanostructured sensor is presented for highly selective methanol detection in less than two minutes. This device enables on-site analyses by distillers, authorities and health professionals.
- Energy: Porous Liquid Technologies - Porous Liquid Technologies is a unique technology enabling ultra-efficient CO2 capture by combining low-cost, readily available porous liquids and solids to create an easily recyclable/regenerable liquid, with high CO2 capacity. These liquids display huge cost advantages and thermal stability over current technology. Physisorbed gas can be released at low energy by a simple temperature/pressure swing.
- Environment: Low Sulphur Fuels - LSF has developed a unique chemical recycling process to convert used hydrocarbon containing feedstocks and produce circular outputs that can be used to make new plastics, rubbers, chemicals and other industrial products.
- Health: MetalloBio Limited - MetalloBio has developed a novel ruthenium platform technology with application potential as a systemic antibiotic and as a coating for medical devices. The compounds that underpin the platform are more active than clinical antibiotics, have a novel multi-modal mechanism of action, little-no-emergence of resistance and represent a new antimicrobial class.
