The April issue of CJCE features a special issue section comprising invited papers from the Indo-Canadian International Symposia jointly organized by the Canadian Society for Chemical Engineering (CSChE) and the Indian Institute of Chemical Engineers (IIChE) at the CHEMCON conferences in 2022 and 2023 in Kanpur and Kolkata, respectively, as well as the CSChE conferences in 2023 and 2024 in Calgary and Toronto, respectively. In the preface to this special issue section, guest editors Sonil Nanda, Ajay K. Dalai, and Prasenjit Mondal note that this special issue section “showcases outstanding research and development by international scholars working in green fuels, chemicals, and materials production, and clean technologies that deploy innovative catalytic, biocatalytic, and advanced reaction routes.” The Editor’s Choice article as well as the first two Issue Highlight articles appear in this special issue section.
The Editor’s Choice article of this issue is “Review of recent advances in the design, synthesis, and modification of biochar for remediation of heavy metal pollution in water” by Soumik Chakma, Mehedi Hasan, Sudip K. Rakshit, Janusz Kozinski, and Kang Kang. Within this open access article, the authors note that “heavy metal contamination of water has long been a serious environmental issue” and that “biochar and biochar-based composites are emerging as effective and sustainable solutions for heavy metal removal due to their strong adsorption abilities and environmentally friendly nature”. This article “focuses on the latest developments in designing, producing, and modifying biochar for heavy metal remediation.”
The first Issue Highlight article is an open access article from authors Marcos Paulo Patta Granado, Prakhar Talwar, Sahil Sahil, Andrea Cressoni De Conti, Sonil Nanda, and Janusz A. Kozinski titled “Integrated and closed-loop biorefinery strategies for efficient waste valorization and biofuel production”. This article “reviews emerging biorefinery technologies, including fermentation, anaerobic digestion, densification, torrefaction, pyrolysis, liquefaction, and gasification”, “emphasizes the integration of biorefinery technologies, focusing on energy-driven systems and closed-loop waste utilization and management pathways”, and explores “physical, chemical, and biological pretreatment techniques, along with the principles and unit operations associated with both biological and thermochemical biorefinery technologies”.
The second issue highlight is an open access article titled “Revisiting acidulation for tall oil and lignin manufacturing” from Thomas Aro, Weijue Gao, and Pedram Fatehi. Within the abstract, the authors note that “tall oil is a byproduct of the kraft pulping process when softwood is used as raw material” and “as the production of softwood-based pulp is in high demand, the optimization of the tall oil production process needs to be revisited to ensure the highest quality and quantity of tall oil manufacturing”. As a result, within this study “the process for tall oil production was optimized in terms of tall oil yield, acid number, and tall oil components (i.e., fatty acid, rosin acid, unsaponifiable, and moisture contents) by considering acidulation reaction time, pH, water content, and settling additive.”
The final issue highlight is an open access article from Ceanna Ting-Yan Cheung and Matthew Ripmeester titled “Dynamic accelerated solvent extraction for faster oil sands oil, water, and solids determination and solids cleaning”. Here, the authors note that “determining the oil, water, and solids (OWS) contents of oil sand is essential to many aspects of the oil sands industry including mine planning, optimization of extraction processes, and tailings management” and “beyond OWS, the characterization of the mineral solids associated with oil sands can provide critical supplementary information for oil sands operations”. While the “industry standard” Soxhlet–Dean and Stark extraction method is “reliable and robust”, it “requires long extraction times, high solvent consumption, and extensive glassware handling” and “other traditional solids cleaning methods like cold solvent washing are labour, time, and solvent intensive”. Therefore, within this study “dynamic accelerated solvent extraction (dASE) is evaluated as a potential faster alternative technique for OWS characterization and solids cleaning”.