Engineering Commons^™

Computationally-Driven Insights Into The Ligand Environments Of Materials For Catalysis And Separations, Stephen Vicchio

All Dissertations

Designing new catalytic and sorption materials is necessary to limit global temperature rise below 1.5 ◦C by 2050, while also meeting global energy demands. Climate change and energy production are not mutually exclusive; global population growth has direct impacts on global energy demands and climate. In both catalysis and adsorption applications, new technologies are needed to address these challenges. Catalysis can provide alternate, low-energy routes for converting low-value gases into higher-value chemical commodities, thus altering our current energy production. Likewise, new sorption materials can capture previously emitted CO₂ from decades of energy production from fossil fuels, thus helping to …

Catalytic Consequences Of Catalyst Pellet Architecture On The Methanol To Oxymethylene Process, Sebastian M K Cook

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

A critical step for the synthesis of renewable oxy methyl ethers (OME) targeted towards diesel substitution, is the catalytic production of a dimethoxymethane/formaldehyde mixture from methanol and air. The bifunctional catalyst requirements needed for methanol to undergo both the acidic and oxidative steps required for dimethoxymethane formation have been recently established for TiO₂-supported vanadia catalysts. However, translating these requirements to a catalyst capable of industrial operation remains a challenge. This thesis examines the considerations and adjustments needed to translate the molecular active phase to a large-scale catalytic pellet, including active phase distribution and possibility of hot-spot creation during …

Separation Of Organic Acids Through Direct Catalysis From Sugars, Katelyn Robinson

Chemical Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Society relies on plastic products, whether they are single use or durable. A downside of plastic is that the most common type is a product of oil and oil is not only a limited resource but also a climate-damaging resource. Polylactic acid (PLA) is a bio-based, biodegradable plastic. However, the process of converting biomass to polylactic acid polymer has the largest environmental impact of the PLA production process, so alternative methods of conversion are needed (Moretti et al., 2021). The polylactic acid polymer can be made with lactic acid, which can be converted from glucose.

Phosphorus-Containing Zeolites For Biofuel Production, Jason Gulbinski

Doctoral Dissertations

Fossil fuel consumption increases 2% a year due to transportation fuels and specialty chemicals for plastics and synthetic fibers such as p-xylene, a monomer of polyethylene terephthalate. p-Xylene demand was over 50 million tons in 2021 and will increase by 5% a year through 2026. Therefore, sustainable p-xylene production is desired. p-Xylene is produced renewably through Diels-Alder cycloaddition of biomassderived 2,5-dimethylfuran (DMF) with ethylene from bio-ethanol and dehydration over an acid catalyst. Industrial aluminosilicate zeolite catalysts achieve a selectivity of 75%, with loss to side products and coking. A new class of catalysts, phosphoric acid-containing aluminum-free zeolites, P-zeosils, like dealuminated …

Ambient Ammonia Synthesis Via Microwave-Catalytic Materials And Plasma Chemistry, Siobhan Brown

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

Ammonia is critical to supporting human life on earth because of its use as fertilizer. The Haber-Bosch process to produce ammonia has been practiced for over 100 years. This process operates at high pressure and temperature to overcome the thermodynamic and kinetic limitations of the ammonia synthesis reaction thus researchers have tried to overcome it for decades. At present this process represents 1% of global energy usage and 2.5% of global CO₂ emissions. The proposed chemical looping ammonia synthesis approach seeks to reduce the environmental impact of this critical process and to elucidate microwave-catalytic principles.

This research aims to …