South Dakota Mines unveils cutting-edge CNAM-Bio Center

RAPID CITY, S.D. (KEVN) - South Dakota Mines opened the Composite and Nanocomposite Advanced Manufacturing-Biomaterials Center (CNAM-Bio) Bioprocessing Facility at the Composites and Polymer Engineering (CAPE) Laboratory Wednesday.

“In South Dakota, we have the resources necessary: waste agriculture products and waste forestry products, which can be used to make high-value bioproducts that are normally made from fossil fuels,” David Salem, director of the CNAM Bio-Center, stated

CNAM-Bio works with industry and government partners to help solve bioprocessing challenges and create a seamless path from bench-scale to pilot-level production. Their mission involves developing sustainably manufactured bioproducts from renewable feedstocks, including forestry and agriculture residues like corn stover. CNAM-Bio can produce bioproducts such as biodegradable bioplastics and various specialty chemicals for a range of applications, such as biosurfactants, bio-solvents, and bio-based coatings.

“This would be a way to add value to South Dakota’s agricultural and forestry commodities. Once we harvest corn or soybeans, the remaining biomass can be made into high-value materials via bioprocessing,” says Laurie Anderson, Ph.D., interim vice president of research at SDM.

The new bioprocessing facility will be crucial in allowing CNAM-Bio to evaluate the commercial viability of its bioproducts and bioprocessing innovations before transitioning them to the newly opened POET Bioproducts Center operated by Dakota BioWorx in Brookings, a partnership between SDM, South Dakota State University, and private industry, which opened on Oct. 11.

“CNAM-Bio’s new bioprocessing infrastructure will support bioproduction scaling using bioreactors ranging from three to 260 liters. Transitioning from the bench scale to a larger bioreactor is not viable without a step-wise scale-up of processes to the intermediate pilot scale provided by the advanced bioprocessing capabilities at the SDM facility,” says Salem.

“This will give them a basic understanding, and it will also help them develop in the workforce because this is a growing field. Biotechnology and bioprocessing are very growing technologies for the students, and we have multiple students working with us starting from the undergraduate programs, from the mechanical department, chemical department, and nano department,” Dr. Krishnan Veluswamy, senior research engineer and scientist at South Dakota Mines, stated

“We aim to scale up to a level that allows us to determine the feasibility of large-scale production,” Salem says.

“This facility will attract research and development money into South Dakota and use abundant feedstocks from agriculture and forestry to scale up to pilot scales for commercialization,” says Anderson.

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