Category Archives: Environment

Omega Munch

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Omega Munch, a naturally gluten free – organic fruit and seed snack is perfect for any time of day. Omega Munch combines organic flax seeds, sesame seeds, sunflower seeds, and quinoa with delicious raisins, all in a shape convenient for snacking on the go! A low-calorie food, Omega Munch is an excellent source of fiber and provides real fruit, protein, and heart-healthy omega-3s (without that fish oil aftertaste).

Omega Munch doesn’t just provide great nutrition—it also tastes great! Unlike other seed snacks, Omega Munch has a chewy yet crunchy texture and a nutty, fruity flavor. The final formulation for Omega Munch was optimized by a team of Ohio State University food science students.   The team was recently a finalist in the Product Development Competition at the 2011 meeting of the Institute of Food Technologists.

Nutritional Information

A serving size of Omega Munch (5 pieces) contains 120 calories, 8 g total fat, 1 g saturated fat, 4 g dietary fiber, 4 g sugar, 3 g protein, and 5 mg sodium.

Ingredients

Organic Thompson Raisins, Organic Brown Flax Seeds, Organic Sesame Seeds (Roasted), Organic Sunflower Seeds (Roasted), Organic Red Quinoa, Water, Cornstarch, Blueberry Fiber, Organic Cayenne Pepper, Organic Ancho Chili Pepper, Organic Garlic Powder, Organic Chipotle Pepper, Sea Salt and Organic Black Pepper.

Sensory Testing

Sensory testing was performed to optimize the level of spiciness or for the product and to evaluate the attributes of the final product.

Shelf Life

Shelf life study revealed that Omega Munch maintains microbiological and oxidative stability for a long period of time. Pathogen testing of the production facilities and the product will still be conducted periodically. Based upon initial observations and the product  is shelf stable.  No noticeable changes in flavor were perceived after more than 30 days of storage.

*Additional nutritional information, sensory testing data, cost analyses, packaging, storage, and processing information are available upon request.  *

A Bi-Phasic Bioretention System for Storm Water Runoff Management

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Summary:

OSU Researchers have developed a new method for the effective treatment of stormwater runoff pollutants using sediment filtration and adsorption, and biochemical processes under bi-phasic bioretention conditions. The method optimizes retention time of the runoff through the system and maximizes removal rates of runoff pollutants, resulting in more reliable and efficient treatment mechanisms than current systems.

Potential Applications:

  • Urban and suburban homeowners
  • Commercial properties
  • Environmentally conscious individuals

Advantages:

  • Optimizes retention time of the runoff through the system
  • Maximizes removal rates of runoff pollutants
  • More reliable and efficient treatment mechanism

A High-Efficiency Chemical Looping Process to Produce Low-Cost Hydrogen from Gaseous Fuels

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Summary:

Researchers at The Ohio State University have developed a highly efficient chemical looping process that utilizes cyclic redox reactions of metal oxide (MO) particles with gaseous fuels (like syngas and natural gas) and steam to produce hydrogen. Named as SynGas Redox (SGR), the process as developed is a marked improvement over the conventional Steam-Iron process to produce hydrogen.

MO + CO/H2/CH4 <-> M + CO2 + H2O
M + H2O <-> MO + H2

The primary metal oxide in SGR is Fe2O3 which is converted to Fe on reaction with syngas. The reactor design allows for a complete conversion of syngas to a mixture of carbon dioxide and water, exiting the reactor using the same high pressure of the gasifier. Upon condensation of water, a relatively pure stream of carbon dioxide is produced which is ready for sequestration. The iron oxide is regenerated in a second reactor, the design of which is also optimized for maximum conversion of steam to hydrogen.

The process has been demonstrated on a bench scale reactor with significant success, including detailed ASPEN simulations. The process has also been optimized (and integrated) for syngas derived from a commercially available dry feed bituminous coal gasifier. Close to 75% of the coal HHV (high heating value) can be converted to hydrogen HHV, suggesting a much higher efficiency than the conventional coal gasification-water gas shift route to hydrogen. Preliminary cost analysis suggests a significant reduction in the cost of hydrogen as compared to the SMR (steam methane reforming) process for natural gas. The process can be further adapted to Coal-To-Liquids(CTL) plants to utilize by-products from the Fischer-Tropsch reactor, resulting in a higher (over 10%) yield of liquid fuels and a significant reduction in operational costs by handling carbon dioxide separation more efficiently. Additionally, optimizing iron oxide particles has led to the development of strong particles durable at high temperatures, demonstrated to maintain full oxygen transfer capacity over a 100 cycles of reduction and oxidation.

Potential Applications:

  • Centralized large scale hydrogen production: Uses in oil refining, ammonia manufacture
  • Coal to Liquid (CTL) plants
  • Suitable for making Fe particles which can be used for hydrogen storage and producing electricity via fuel cells

Advantages:

  • Integrated CO2 separation, with no costly separation techniques. Provides ready to sequester CO2 stream by design, offering several environmental benefits
  • Fuel flexibility, allowing for all kinds of gaseous carbonaceous fuels such as syngas, producer gas, natural gas, and fuel cell exhaust
  • Can help tailor H2/CO ratio of syngas to any desired level
  • High hydrogen production efficiency (80-90%)
  • Over 15% costs savings over traditional processes
  • Easily adaptable for integration with CTL plants, resulting in cost reductions
  • Produces low cost Fe2O3 composite particles, shown to undergo more that 100 redox cycles without loss in activity

Poultry Gut Array: Poultry Gut Microflora Array

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Summary:

Gut microflora in both chickens and turkeys has an important role in host nutrition and gut health.  As such, any attempt to improve poultry nutrition, feed efficiency, and gut health involves analysis of gut microflora in these birds. 

Dr. Zhongtang Yu in the Department of Animal Sciences at OSU has developed the Poultry Gut Array to enable comprehensive analysis of gut bacteria in poultry in a cost-effective manner.  The Poultry Gut Array can be used to analyze up to six samples simultaneously for 1,920 different bacteria present in the gut of either chickens or turkeys.  The Poultry Gut Array analysis is much cheaper than other comprehensive analysis, such as parallel massive DNA sequencing. 

The Poultry Gut Array enables the analysis of most bacteria present in the gut of chickens and turkeys and their immediate environment (litter).  Comprehensive analysis of the bacteria present in the poultry gut is required in studies in development of dietary means to enhance nutrition and gut health.  The Poultry Gut Array can also be used in the diagnosis and monitoring of flock health status. 

The Poultry Gut Array has 1,920 specific probes that enable detection and quantification of individual species. Also included are a universal probe that detects total bacteria and total archaea and control probes that allow for normalization and validation of microarray analysis.  The comprehensiveness of this new technology exceeds any currently available techniques or methods. 

The Poultry Gut Array is designed on phylogenetic marker sequences collected worldwide, enabling analysis of gut microflora in poultry and turkeys in any country.  Some of the probes were designed based on sequences retrieved from public databases, the remainder were designed from sequences generated in Dr. Yu’s laboratory. 

Potential Applications:

The unprecedented, comprehensive, cost-effective analysis enabled by the Poultry Gut Array provides a new platform that can support studies of poultry nutrition and disease prevention and more rational development of new feeds and feed additives.  The Poultry Gut Array is potentially a powerful and useful technology for research laboratories, service laboratories, and R&D laboratories of feed companies. 

Advantages:

Until now, no such technology was available for such comprehensive analysis of poultry gut microflora.  The existing technologies, such as plate count, most probable number, and real-time PCR only allow a small number of bacteria to be analyzed in an efficient and cost-effective manner.  Metagenomics empowered by pyrosequencing can help to analyze most bacteria in the gut, but it has inherent limitations (high error, high cost, computing-demanding data management and analysis, and lack of quantification) for comparative analysis of multiple samples that are inevitably required in nutrition and gut health studies.  Additionally, this metagenomic analysis is PCR-based so inaccuracy caused by PCR bias is inevitable.  Analysis of pyrosequencing data is time consuming and can also pose a computational challenge. 

Low-Power, High-Performance Tunneling Field Effect Transistors for Advanced Computing

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Summary:

Silicon-based field effect transistor (FET) devices are building blocks of silicon-based digital, analog, and hybrid electronics. Often made of a metal-oxide-silicon (MOS) type structure, these devices are interconnected to generate so-called "complementary" MOSFET circuits, known as CMOS transistor circuitry. CMOS enjoys the benefits of low power and high speed operation, and advancements in these two properties have primarily been achieved through reduction of the channel length, which is now well into the submicron range for commercial devices. However, CMOS technology is approaching certain fundamental limits that will prohibit further miniaturization, likely due to the complex material formulations used. To overcome these limits, researchers at The Ohio State University have developed a novel Tunneling Field Effect Transistor (TFET) that will allow for further device miniaturization, reduced power, and increased speed beyond what is possible with current CMOS technology, while still enabling the use of well-established CMOS manufacturing processes.

Potential Applications:

  • High-performance computing
  • Power-constrained military systems
  • Handheld/miniature electronics
  • Practically anywhere silicon-based electronics are used

Advantages:

  • Extends CMOS, enabling a new generation of device topologies while allowing the use of current manufacturing processes
  • Faster turn-on at lower voltages than competing TFET designs
  • Steep sub-threshold slopes (below 60mV/decade)
  • Less current leakage in the "off" state compared to competing TFET designs
  • Higher current densities in the "on" state compared to competing TFET designs

A System for Automated Seed Vigor Assessment

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Summary:

Researchers at The Ohio State University have developed a system for automated seed vigor assessment that is objective, economical and easy to perform. Seed vigor testing provides valuable information for assessing seed lot quality. Vigor testing is very critical because it ranks the performance of a seed lot against other seed lots when planted in the field. However, most vigor tests have not experienced widespread use because of their subjectivity, time consuming nature, high cost and inconsistent test results in various laboratories. In the newly-invented system, images are scanned and processed by the computer to generate numerical values that collectively represent the quality of a seed lot (vigor index) based on sample mean of various statistics acquired from morphological features of the imaged seedlings.

Potential Applications:

  • Seed and Cop production
  • Plant genetics

Advantages:

A reliable, efficient, objective, cost-effective method of assessing seed vigor.

Resonant Interband Tunneling Diodes–Extending Moore’s Law and Enabling New Circuitry

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Summary:

Since the early 1960’s, the utility of the tunnel diode (or Esaki diode) has been evident, but several practical hurdles have kept it from reaching mainstream status. Historically, it has been difficult to control peak current and, more importantly, tunnel diode fabrication has lacked a Si-based process that can easily be mass produced and integrated into existing Si-based integrated circuits. As a result, today’s tunnel diodes are primarily used in discrete form and for niche applications. Regardless, tunnel diodes have many current and future applications, and the challenges of aggressively scaled CMOS is forcing this subject to be seriously revisited, since quantum tunneling will dominate in any ultra-low dimensional material. The structure of the Resonant Interband Tunneling Diode (RITD) differs from that of the Esaki diode (traditional tunnel diode) which results in additional useful properties. In RITDs, electrons quantum mechanically tunnel across an energy well formed between two barriers, where Esaki diodes have no energy well. This quantum mechanical tunneling effect happens extremely quickly and thus very high speed electronics can be realized with the use of RITDs. Terahertz operation has been demonstrated. Furthermore, a useful effect called Negative Differential Resistance (NDR) can be exploited using these devices.

Potential Applications:

  • Can augment CMOS technology resulting in novel logic and embedded circuit topologies with reduced device count, low power, and faster speed.
  • Can be implemented in ICs, memory devices, and small, lightweight portable electronics for greater performance at lower power consumption
  • Applications found in oscillators, frequency locking circuits, advanced SRAM circuits, highly integrated A/D converters, high speed digital latches, and many others

Advantages:

  • Uses quantum tunneling, a very high-speed process. Terahertz operation has been demonstrated
  • Shown to exhibit Negative Differential Resistance (NDR)
  • Low cost, compatible with current CMOS technology, and easy to integrate into existing manufacturing processes
  • Runs at room temperature and at very low voltage
  • Can be combined with existing technologies to offer flexibility

IP Status:

Tunneling Diode: Use and Manufacturing – US Pending
Using Backward Tunneling Diode as a Sensor – US Pending

Measuring CO2 Exchange in Plants

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Summary:

An understanding of a plant’s response to the environment is important for the prediction of its growth and development. Researchers at Ohio State have developed a new method for measuring whole canopy CO2 exchange rates in plants. Whole plant carbon exchange rate measurements provide an integral assessment of how an entire plant responds to biotic and abiotic factors. This method provides more accurate measurements of plant response to environmental stimuli and provides a method for more easily predicting final yields.

Potential Applications:

  • Commercial planting strategies and yield improvement practices
  • Commercial plant variety selection
  • Ecosystems research

Advantages:

  • Increased ability to predict final yield
  • Increased measurement of short term plant response to stimuli
  • Ability to perform high temporal resolution studies of plant responses to their environmental stimuli

Novel Organic Light Emitting Diode (OLED) Technologies for Lighting and Display Applications

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Summary:

Researchers at The Ohio State University have developed a comprehensive portfolio of Organic Light Emitting Diode (OLED) technologies that include novel materials and device architectures as platforms for functional devices and for device manufacturing. These developments improve material stability over time while improving their performance such that the required voltage can be reduced and improved electroluminescence can be obtained with reduced power consumption. The bilayer device structure improves device quantum efficiency and brightness due to charge confinement and exciplex emission at the emitting polymer interface. Beyond advancements in the materials themselves, novel device architectures have been developed which are independent of the materials used. These advancements may be of significant value in simplifying manufacturing, thereby accelerating the displacement of LCD and plasma display technologies as well as the displacement of traditional incandescent and fluorescent lighting sources. The associated patent portfolio consists of 8 patent families with a total of 11 issued U.S. patents and 39 associated national stage filings (spanning all US cases). A listing of all issued U.S. patents can be found below.

Potential Applications:

  • Conformal, designable, and color-variable interior and exterior lighting for residential and commercial environments
  • Power and weight sensitive lighting and display applications (e.g. aircraft interior lighting, portable display backlighting)
  • Portable lighting devices such as flashlights
  • Light, ultra-thin, flexible displays with rich colors viewable from very wide angles
  • Body-wearable lighting and display applications
  • Nearly endless list of potential applications

Advantages:

  • More energy efficient lighting source compared to incandescent and fluorescent approaches
  • Color quality matches or surpasses conventional approaches in lighting and display applications
  • Estimated useful life is approximately 17-25 times longer than incandescent lighting and nearly twice as long as linear flourescent lighting (which is commonly used in modern LCD displays)
  • Polymeric material is conformal to a wide range of surface topologies and allows for ultra-thin, flexible displays
  • Low cost, materials-independent architectures have the potential to lower manufacturing costs
  • Adjustable color spectrum

Coccobello: A Dark Chocolate/Lime Mousse/Coconut Gluten-free Mini-cannoli

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Summary:

A team of OSU Food Science students recently won the Product Development Competition at the 2010 meeting of the Institute of Food Technologists for their creation of Coccobello, a gluten-free mini-cannoli. 

Coccobello is a crunchy mini-cannoli coated in rich dark chocolate, dashed with toasted coconut and filled with a light, smooth lime mousse.  Coccobello’s unique texture, flavor and look will address a need for gluten-free treats.  Coccobello is distinct from other gluten-free snacks as it delivers a unique look, a texture contrast (crunchy on the outside, soft and mousse-like in the inside) and flavor contrast (chocolate on the outside, lime in the inside).  Coccobello also delivers nutrients that are usually deficient in gluten-free diets (fiber, B vitamins).  Coccobello, including the filling, is shelf-stable, not requiring refrigeration.  The final formulation for Coccobello was optimized by the OSU Food Science team over the course of over seven months. 

Nutritional Information
A serving size of Coccobello (3 mini-cannolis) contains 118 calories, 9.6 g total fat, 3 g saturated fat, 10 g sugars, and 36 mg sodium.  

Ingredients
Dark chocolate (55% cocoa: cocoa beans, sugar, cocoa butter, natural vanilla flavor.  Emulsifier: soy lecithin), white sugar, roasted coconut, light corn syrup, brown rice flour, whole egg, brown rice fiber, cocoa butter, egg white, coconut oil, potato starch, egg white powder, lime juice powder (corn sugar, lime juice, citric acid), lime oil, citric acid, vanilla extract, salt, cream of tartar, xanthan gum. 

Specific formulation of the gluten-free shell, outer coating, and filling are available upon request. 

Sensory Testing
Sensory testing was performed to optimize the lime flavor and acceptability of chocolate coating. 

Shelf-life
Several storage studies were performed to determine the physical and microbial stability of Coccobello upon storage at room temperature.  Coccobello was found to maintain the desired crunchiness during storage.  Water activity and microbial load of Coccobello were monitored during a 25-day storage period.  There was no change in water activity over the course of the storage period for the finished product or any of the components.  Microbial counts remained below the detection limit over the course of the study.

Projected profitability
A cost analysis of Coccobello production indicates that it will become profitable for the manufacturer in Year 2 and that a retail price of $3.50 will be able to provide a mark-up of 56% and 35%, to the processor and retailer, respectively.

Additional nutritional information, sensory testing data, cost analyses, packaging, storage, and processing information are available upon request. 

Potential Applications:

Coccobello’s primary target market is the 12% of the US population currently seeking gluten-free products, and their family members and friends (Baking Business 2009).  From 2004 to 2008, the gluten-free market grew at an annual rate of 28% to $1.6 billion and is expected to reach $2.6 billion by 2012 (Foodnavigator-usa 2009).  This growth is driven by three key factors: better diagnosis of celiac disease, increased demand for gluten-free products, and entire families frequently adopting gluten-free diets after a family member is diagnosed with celiac disease. 

Key unmet needs in the gluten-free market include textural contrasts and indulgent flavors (Foodnavigator-usa 2009).  These issues are driven by ingredient constraints in a gluten-free products and an absence of innovative products.  Typical gluten-free cookies are simply gluten-free versions of cookies consumers are already familiar with.  Coccobello offers texture contrast, specifically crunchiness in the shell, and gourmet, indulgent-looking product that stands out from standard gluten-free cookies. 

These characteristics place Coccobello in direct competition with the higher-end gluten-free products.  The primary competitors in this segment are Glutino and Schar.  Glutino offers a line of gluten-free cookies and candy bars, which are priced at $3.99 per 4.6 oz. package ($0.87/oz.).  Schar chocolate hazelnut bars, sell at $1.19/oz., and represents the most comparable gluten-free cookie to Coccobello.  Cococobello will stand apart from these offerings due to its innovative shape, flavor combination, and texture contrast.  Pricing of Coccobello at $3.50 per 3.76 oz. package ($0.93/oz.) would be in line with competitors price points.