Highlights

Are you wondering what gets my research group busy these days? We do many cool things, but we present in this section some highlights of our works.

1_ Herbicides from wastewater

You read the title correctly - herbicides from wastewater. We asked, "what if we develop a method to outsource herbicides from locally produced organic waste streams such as wastewater from various sources (commercial, residential, municipal, etc.)?" We introduce our patent-pending (currently with Provisional Patent status with US Patent Office) technology of producing herbicides of nonanoic acid from the ozone cracking of oleic acid accumulated by oleaginous microorganisms feeding on organic wastes.

Spoiler alert: Our herbicide-from-wastewater technology works, so you will see our results via paper publications and demo processing systems soon.

Research Grant: Principal Investigator (PI) - Dhan Lord B. Fortela; Production of Nonanoic Acid and Similar Herbicides via In-situ Ozone Cracking of Microbial Oils Cultivated on Organic Wastewaters, 2025-2028. Funding Agency: Louisiana Board of Regents (LA-BOR); Sub-program: Industrial Ties Research Subprogram (ITRS). Fund: US$ 301,573 (external fund from LA-BOR) + US$ 199,579 (internal fund as Co-share by UL Lafayette plus consultation services by collaborators) = US$ 501,152 total project fund. [https://rsi.laregents.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/RD_ITRS_2025_FINAL.pdf]
Provisional Patent: Inventors: Dhan Fortela, Ashley Mikolajczyk, Wayne Sharp, William Holmes, Mark E. Zappi; Year: 2025; Title: Methods for making herbicide active ingredients; Assignee: University of Louisiana at Lafayette
Funding agencies and collaborators in this project:

2_ Stak'em

Research Grant: Principal Investigator (PI) - Dhan Lord B. Fortela; Stak'em - A Rocket Science Educational Kit for K-12 and Beyond, 2025-2026. Funding Agency: Louisiana Space Grant (LaSPACE) Consortium; Sub-program: LURA.
Provisional Patent: Inventors: Dhan Fortela, Ashley Mikolajczyk; Year: 2025; Title: Stackable model rocket system and method for using same; Assignee: University of Louisiana at Lafayette
Trademark: Stak'em (r)
Funding agency: LSU/Louisiana Space Grant (LaSPACE)

3_ AspenPlus RL

(Selected as Issue Cover for ChemEngineering Journal, Special Issue "New Advances in Chemical Engineering" - see paper referencing below)

Implementation of Soft-Actor Critic (SAC) Reinforcement Learning (RL) as automated optimization procedure for modeling of chemical process systems via the AspenPlus software.

Paper 1 (Peer-reviewed publication): Fortela, D.L.B.; Broussard, H.; Ward, R.; Broussard, C.; Mikolajczyk, A.P.; Bayoumi, M.A.; Zappi, M.E. Soft Actor-Critic Reinforcement Learning Improves Distillation Column Internals Design Optimization. ChemEngineering 2025, 9, 34. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/chemengineering9020034
Paper 2 (on-going): Generalization of Continuous-Discrete SAC-RL for AspenPlus-based Model Optimization (as MS thesis)

4_ Mentor Award

Award: UL Outstanding Mentor for Undergraduate Research 2023-2024

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