Engineering Commons^™

Identification Of Proximal And Isolated Aluminum Heteroatoms In Zeolites By Infrared Spectroscopy, Melanie A. Brunet Torres, Philip Kester, Rajamani Gounder

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

High demand for energy production and limited fossil fuel reserves are two factors that motivate intense research for new alternative energy resources. While we are still far from completely moving to renewable energy solutions, a new solution that replaces crude oil and coal with shale gas is currently under investigation. For this modern technology, new zeolite catalysts need to be developed for the conversion of light hydrocarbons gases to liquid transportation fuels. These catalysts are of special interest in the production of liquid fuels since they exhibit high reaction rates, molecular sieving properties and selectivity behavior. In this work, the …

Investigation Of The Effects Of Solid-State Treatments On The Structure And Mobility Of Copper In Zeolites, Jiayang Wu, Laura Wilcox, Rajamani Gounder

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Zeolites are microporous, aluminosilicate catalysts that play an important role in industrial applications as well as studies for the fundamental understanding of catalysts for emerging reactions of interest. The introduction of aluminum into the zeolite lattice introduces a negative charge on the framework that can be balanced with extra-framework cations. The control of the aluminum distribution and the choice of charge balancing cations allows for the ability to tailor the active sites to facilitate a desired reaction. This research focuses on studying copper active sites in zeolites. Copper oxide was used as a copper precursor to introduce copper ions in …

Synthesis And Characterization Of Microporous And Mesoporous Catalysts For Shale Gas Upgrading, Danesh Contractor, Ravi Joshi, Rajamani Gounder

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

The petroleum industry is gradually shifting from using naphtha to ethane as its feedstock and new ethane steam crackers are being built. Using ethane as a feedstock produces more ethene and less co-products such as propene, aromatics and C4 alkenes. Thus, the shift in feedstock will reduce the availability of these co-products. Developing methods for the interconversion of alkenes, and specifically using ethene as a reactant, can solve this problem.

This project focuses on synthesis and characterization of zeolites with the BEA framework topology, and their nickel exchanged versions as potential ethene dimerization catalysts. In future work, these materials will …