(6w) Fundamental Studies and Applications of Nano-Structured Catalysts in Domestic Fuel Production

Conference

AIChE Annual Meeting

Year

2016

Proceeding

2016 AIChE Annual Meeting

Group

Meet the Faculty Candidate Poster Session – Sponsored by the Education Division

Session

Poster Session: Meet the Faculty Candidate - Catalysis & Reaction Engineering

Time

Sunday, November 13, 2016 - 1:00pm to 3:30pm

Authors

Wen, C. - Presenter, University of South Carolina

Fundamental studies and Applications of
Nano-structured Catalysts in Domestic Fuel Production

Cun Wen, University of South Carolina,
Columbia, SC

Liquid fuels are the largest
commodity on the market in terms of total volume of sales, but the U.S. is
lagging behind the curve of novel technologies for domestic fuel production and
upgrading. For instance, U.S. is projected to be a fuel exporting country in
the next few years because of the booming of shale gas. However, exporting
shale gas has the lowest market value per energy content. Upgrading shale gas
into gasoline, on the other side, can boost the price by more than 230%. Unfortunately,
this technology is yet to appear on the horizon for the U.S. shale-gas producer,
while South Africa and China have already built and operated such units for decades.
Besides civilian fuel production, the situation of military fuel generation is
not optimistic either. U.S. still can’t fly a High-hypersonic jet with speed
exceeding Mach 10, while other countries have already tested their high-hypersonic
vehicles for several years. Lagging behind in powering high-hypersonic jet will
potentially expose our homeland to other country’s high speed jets and missiles,
and therefore is a serious national-security concern. One of the main problems for
powering high-hypersonic jet is to provide high energy-density fuels to the engine.
Another example of domestic fuel production is the biofuels. In 2013, the US Navy
and Airforce were still paying more than $15 dollars/gallon for biofuels. The
high production cost was a result of energy-intensive processes that were
needed at the time. Domestic production of transportation fuel is one of the
United States’ top priorities, as underscored by President Obama in his 2012
State of the Union Address: “This country needs an all-out, all-of-the-above
strategy that develops every available source of American energy…… and nowhere
is the promise of innovation greater than in American-made energy.”

To produce fuel
domestically, catalyst development resides in the heart of the solution,
because a good catalyst can lead to fuels with higher through-put, lower price,
and higher energy-density. Herein, my group will be focused on developing novel
catalysts for domestic fuel production and upgrading. Through my enriched
experience in energy catalysis, I have studied reactions involved in almost
every aspect of domestic fuel production, such as methane partial oxidation,
water gas shift, Fischer-Tropsch, and hydrodeoxygenation for biodiesel
production.^1-11 One uniqueness in my problem-solving technique is
design catalyst’s nanostructure based on fundamental understanding of reaction
mechanism and kinetics. A recent example of how I apply such strategy to solve
long-standing problems is designing the first-of-its-kind self-healing
catalysts for Fischer-Tropsch synthesis. Cobalt catalysts have been considered the
most attractive catalyst among all candidate metals, but a bottle-neck issue
with cobalt catalysts is their tendency to deactivation through oxidation by
water produced during the process. Through a comprehensive study of the reaction
mechanism and kinetics, my idea is to design a cobalt catalyst that can be
easily reduced with hydrogen in the feedstock so that the oxidation/deactivation
process can be reversed. This idea, in the end, led to the first self-healing
catalysts and attracted great amount of interests from academia and industry.^11,12
On the other hand, instead of solely relying on fundamental understanding in
literature, my group will interrogate the reaction of interest with a unique
approach of combining spectroscopic and kinetic studies. Often people study either
reaction mechanism or kinetic one at a time. However, reaction mechanism is the
reaction pathway that has the highest reaction rate among all routes. Therefore,
a combination of spectroscopic and kinetic studies can lead to more
comprehensive understanding of the reaction, and this approach has led to our
new understanding in century-old reactions, such as methane partial-oxidation.^1,8,10
With my strength in catalyst design and fundamental understanding,
breakthroughs in domestic fuel production and upgrading are expected to benefit
our society and prosperity.