Thomas Leong

This study investigated the effect of low-frequency (20 kHz) and high-frequency (414 kHz) ultrasound treatment on the amino acid and secondary structural integrity of dairy proteins. Sonicated skim milk proteins were hydrolysed and analysed with reverse-phase high-performance liquid chromatography to investigate the amino acid content of the processed samples. It was successfully demonstrated that both low-frequency and high-frequency ultrasound did not adversely affect the amino acid content, even after prolonged extreme processing conditions (6 h, 355 kHz). This finding was supplemented with protein secondary structure data (Fourier-transform (FT)-IR secondary derivatives of the amide I band, 1700–1600 cm−1) that showed that ultrasound was capable of causing structural modifications to the dairy proteins. This study shows that ultrasound can be used to influence protein–protein interactions in skim milk via alterations to the secondary structure without degrading the amino acids in the proteins.

Theoretical and experimental aspects of the energy efficiency of ultrasonic emulsification were investigated and compared with conventional high-pressure homogenisation.

Despite the many promising applications of Metal–Organic Frameworks (MOFs) the key advances to boost production to industrial scale still remain elusive. Recently, it has been shown that continuous flow chemistry is capable of handling the production of a large variety of MOFs, while also being scalable. However commonly used laboratory methods for postproduction processing, i.e. separation and activation are ineffective and costly at scale. Here we present the use of megasonics, a novel and scalable methodology based on sonication with high frequency sound waves, which performs separation and activation simultaneously, yielding high surface areas that previously were only obtainable with laboratory-scale methods like solvent exchange, supercritrics and calcination.