De Felice Vincenzo
| SSD | CHIM/03 – General and inorganic chemistry |
| Research interest | In recent years the research has been mainly addressed to the following environmental issues: a) Heavy metals bioremediation of soils. Heavy metals are not biodegradable; they accumulate in living tissues through the food web, causing global environmental problems and major threats to humans after chronic exposure. In some cases, plants have evolved strategies allowing them to grow in metal-contaminated soils, where they extract high concentrations of metals and store them in various tissues without signs of toxicity. b) Wastewater treatment. Microalgae have a great potential in a wide variety of applications, concerning environmental ones, microalgae can play an important role in bioremediation of waste water and carbon dioxide sequestration. The algae utilize the nitrogen and phosphorus in waste-water and, with sufficient light conditions, convert the CO2 into biomass through photosynthesis. This makes microalgae very well suited to carbon mitigation, as their high growth rate scan keep up with the continuous flow of CO2 from the power plant. The aim is to analyze the biological fixation of carbon dioxide (CO2) performed by a wastewater native microalgae culture in a pilot scale raceway pond (RP) using urban wastewater as liquid culture and a 20% CO2 gas supplied to the pond during the daylight. |
| Keywords
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Heavy metals, bioremediation of soils, waste-water treatment, microalgae, carbon dioxide sequestration |