Dr. Rafael L. QUIRINO

Georgia Southern University, USA.

Vegetable oils are natural and renewable starting materials with potential use in a variety of chemical processes leading to an array of bio-based products with great environmental and economic significance, such as thermosetting plastics, bio-composites, coatings, drying oils, hydrogels, and biofuels. Indeed, the conversion of readily available, inexpensive, nature-derived starting materials into useful and value-added chemicals and materials represents an alternative pathway to the already established, mainstream, petroleum platform. Materials such as carbohydrates, triglycerides, lignin, waste biomass, and/or available products directly derived from them have been systematically investigated as components of bio-based, thermosetting composite materials for structural applications in which the polymer matrix is formed by an intricate vegetable oil-based resin. The thermo-mechanical properties of such composites have been extensively analyzed to establish structure-property relationships with the goal of formulating a bio-based material with optimized behavior. Latest advancements on the heat pre-treatment of biomass are briefly discussed.

Dr. Rafael L. QUIRINO : Received a B.S. in Chemistry and an M.S. in Physical Chemistry from the University of Brasilia, Brazil. In 2006, he joined the Larock group at Iowa State University (ISU), where he completed his Ph.D. in Chemistry in 2011. Dr. Quirino then joined, as a research associate, the Polycomp research group lead by Dr. Kessler in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, at ISU. In 2012, Rafael started his independent career at Georgia Southern University and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2017. His research group focuses on the preparation and characterization of novel bio-based polymer and composites and on the investigation of carbon nanotube superheating.