Editor's note: Every week, I introduce you to a handful of Houston innovators to know recently making headlines with news of innovative technology, investment activity, and more. This week's batch includes a Houston chemist, a cleaning product founder, and a UH researcher.
James Tour, chemist at Rice University
The four-year agreement will support the team’s ongoing work on removing PFAS from soil. Photo via Rice University
A Rice University chemist James Tour has secured a new $12 million cooperative agreement with the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center on the team’s work to efficiently remove pollutants from soil.
The four-year agreement will support the team’s ongoing work on removing per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) from contaminated soil through its rapid electrothermal mineralization (REM) process, according to a statement from Rice.
“This is a substantial improvement over previous methods, which often suffer from high energy and water consumption, limited efficiency and often require the soil to be removed,” Tour says. Read more.
Kristy Phillips, founder and CEO of Clean Habits
What started as a way to bring natural cleaning products in from overseas has turned into a promising application for more sustainable agriculture solutions. Photo via LinkedIn
When something is declared clean, one question invariably springs to mind: just how clean is clean?
Then it is, “What metrics decide what’s clean and what’s not?”
To answer those questions, one must abandon the subjective and delve into the scientific — and that’s where Clean Habits come in. The company has science on its side with Synbio, a patented cleaning formula that combines a unique blend of prebiotics and probiotics for their signature five-day clean.
“Actually, we are a synbiotic, which is a prebiotic and a probiotic fused together,” says Kristy Phillips, founder and CEO of Clean Habits. “And that's what gives us the five-day clean, and we also have the longest shelf life — three years — of any probiotic on the market.” Read more.
Jiming Bao, professor at University of Houston
Th innovative method involves techniques that will be used to measure and visualize temperature distributions without direct contact with the subject being photographed. Photo via UH.edu
A University of Houston professor of electrical and computer engineering, Jiming Bao, is improving thermal imaging and infrared thermography with a new method to measure the continuous spectrum of light.
His innovative method involves techniques that will be used to measure and visualize temperature distributions without direct contact with the subject being photographed, according to the university. The challenges generally faced by conventional thermal imaging is addressed, as the new study hopes to eliminate temperature dependence, and wavelength.
“We designed a technique using a near-infrared spectrometer to measure the continuous spectrum and fit it using the ideal blackbody radiation formula,” Bao tells the journal Device. “This technique includes a simple calibration step to eliminate temperature- and wavelength-dependent emissivity.” Read more.
Jiming Bao is a University of Houston professor of electrical and computer engineering. Photo via UH.edu