Khalifa University Graduate Teaching Assistant and PhD candidate, Jawaher AlYammahi, has been awarded an Excellence in Research award from the Second Forum for Women in Research hosted by University of Sharjah.
Quwa: Empowering Women in Research and Innovation categories address the most important issues, topics and priority research challenges in different fields, including health sciences, medicine, engineering, and computing and informatics. Coinciding with Emirati Women’s Day, the Quwa forum was held on 26 August with the 7th International Conference on Arab Women in Computing event.
AlYammahi won the award for engineering for her paper on water-based extraction of sugar from dates. With Rambabu Krishnamoorthy, Post-doctoral Fellow, and Dr. Fawzi Banat, Professor of Chemical Engineering, AlYammahi used a novel technique to extract sugars and micronutrients from dates for use in sugar-alternative products.
“Recently, consumers have been preferring natural fruit sugar products, rather than commercial refined sugar, thanks to growing awareness of the various health risks and diseases related to white sugar,” AlYammahi said. “Date palm fruit is an excellent – and green – source for the glucose and fructose sugars that are a great alternative to the sucrose of refined sugar. However, dates have a gummy consistency, tough skin and rigid cell membrane, hindering the extraction of these alternative sugars, and current techniques just aren’t good enough. We used sub-critical water extraction to get 81 percent of the sugar from the dates, compared to the very low amounts seen using standard techniques.”
Sub-critical water extraction is a new and powerful technique that uses hot water and high pressure to extract different compounds from natural sources, like sugars from dates. It is recognized as a safe, cost-effective and more environmentally-friendly method as it uses water rather than other solvents in the process.
AlYammahi and her team were joined in the competition by other female researchers and students from Khalifa University.
Dr. Ameena Al Sumaiti, Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering, designed a multi-strategy planning support tool for electricity supply management.
With Dr. Mahmoud Meribout, Professor of Electrical Engineering, MSc students Asma Baobaid developed an artificial intelligence platform for face recognition and Budoor Alblooshi developed an autopilot system for autonomous vehicles.
PhD candidate Lamees Al Qassem created a framework for managing cloud workloads with Dr. Ibrahim Elfadel, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Dr. Ernesto Damiani, Professor and Senior Director of the Robotics and Intelligent Systems Institute, and Dr. Thanos Stouraitis, Professor and Department Chair of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
Dr. Maisam Wahbah, Post-doctoral Fellow, developed an algorithm to capture ECG signals from babies still in the womb in the early stages of pregnancy with Dr. Ahsan Khandoker, Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering, and Dr. Mohammad Zitouni, Post-doctoral Fellow.
Maryam Alhasmi and Dr. Balasubramanian Vaithilingam, Principal Research Scientist, created a porous material from carbon to capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
PhD candidate Fahmi Anwar and Dr. Georgios Karanikolos, Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering, developed a novel material for separating ethylene from ethane in the petrochemical industry.
Dr. Saeed Alkhazraji, Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering and Senior Director of Petroleum Institute, and Anjali Goyal, Research Assistant, collaborated with researchers from Higher Colleges of Technology in Abu Dhabi to develop natural particles to remove oil from water after an oil spill.
PhD candidate Amani Alhammadi and Dr. Daniel Choi, Professor of Mechanical Engineering, analyzed the performance of lithium ion batteries in low-temperature space applications.
Jade Sterling
Science Writer
28 October 2021
