专题：The Design of New Catalytic Technologies: Challenges and Opportunities of the Emerging Clean Fuels and Chemicals Industry
授课时间：2015年6月18日13:30-15:00（2学时）
授课地点：A01主教学楼W201教室
主讲人：Prof. George W. Huber
听课班级：石油与化学工程学院全体本科生，欢迎研究生和老师参加。
【主讲人简介】
George W. Huber is the Harvey Spangler Professor of Chemical Engineering at University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research focus is on developing new catalytic processes for the production of renewable liquid fuels and chemicals.
George is one of the most highly cited young scholars in the chemical sciences being cited over 3,200 times in 2014 and over 14,000 times in his career. He has authored over 100 peer-reviewed publications including three publications in Science. Patents and technologies he has helped develop have been licensed by three different companies. He has received several awards including the NSF CAREER award, the Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar award, fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, and the outstanding young faculty award (2010) by the college of engineering at UMass-Amherst. He has been named one of the top 100 people in bioenergy by Biofuels Digest for the past 3 years. He is co-founder of Anellotech () a biochemical company focused on commercializing, catalytic fast pyrolysis, a technology to produce renewable aromatics from biomass. George serves on the editorial board of Energy and Environmental Science, ChemCatChem, Energy Technology, and The Catalyst Review. In June 2007, he chaired a NSF and DOE funded workshop entitled: Breaking the Chemical and Engineering Barriers to Lignocellulosic Biofuels ().
George did a post-doctoral stay with Avelino Corma at the Technical Chemical Institute at the Polytechnical University of Valencia, Spain (UPV-CSIC) where he studied bio-fuels production using petroleum refining technologies. He obtained his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from University of Wisconsin-Madison (2005). He obtained his B.S. (1999) and M.S.(2000) degrees in Chemical Engineering from Brigham Young University.
【授课内容简介】
Concerns about global warming and national security, combined with the diminishing supply and increased cost of fossil fuels are causing our society to search for new sources of transportation fuels. Lignocellulosic biomass, the non-edible portion of biomass including trees, agricultural residues and fast growing energy crops, is available as a renewable feedstock today. In this presentation we will discuss different approaches for the production of renewable fuels and chemicals that are being developed both inside and outside the Huber research group.
The objective of the Huber research group is to develop new catalytic processes and catalytic materials for the production of renewable fuels and chemicals from biomass, solar energy, and natural gas resources. We use a wide range of modern chemical engineering tools to design and optimize these clean technologies including: heterogeneous catalysis, kinetic modeling, reaction engineering, spectroscopy, analytical chemistry, nanotechnology, catalyst synthesis, conceptual process design, and theoretical chemistry. We will highlight some of the challenges and future opportunities for future process development and design of new catalytic approaches. We will show that all the same fuels and chemicals that are made from petroleum can be made from renewable biomass resources. We will also briefly discuss the potential of solar fuels (fuels made from sunlight, CO2 and water).
Hydrodeoxygenation (HDO) is a platform technology used to convert liquid biomass feedstocks (including aqueous carbohydrates, pyrolysis oils, and aqueous enzymatic products) into alkanes, alcohols and polyols. In this process the biomass feed reacts with hydrogen to produce water and a deoxygenated product using a bifunctional catalyst that contains both metal and acid sites. The challenge with HDO is to selectively produce targeted products that can be used as fuel blendstocks or chemicals and to decrease the hydrogen consumption. In our talk we will talk about how to design improved catalytic materials and processes to selective produce both liquid transportation fuels and higher value commodity chemicals from biomass.
Renewable aromatics and olefins can be produced from biomass by a technology catalytic fast pyrolysis (CFP). The aromatics can be used as a feedstock to make renewable polymers including polycarbonates, polyurethanes, polystyrenes, and polyethylene terephthalates. CFP involves the direct production of aromatics from biomass in a single catalytic step. Solid biomass is fed into a fluidized bed reactor where the solid biomass thermally decomposes. The biomass vapors enter a zeolite catalyst where a series of dehydration, decarbonylation and oligomerization reactions occur to form aromatics, olefins, CO, CO2, coke and water. Coke is formed from homogeneous decomposition reactions or catalytic reactions inside the zeolite. Fundamental catalytic studies with model compounds combined with in-situ and temperature programmed techniques have aided in the design of improved zeolite catalysts for CFP.
We believe that new catalytic conversion technologies have a tremendous potential for the production of renewable fuels and chemicals. As will be demonstrated in this presentation chemistry, chemical catalysis and chemical engineering are critical 21st century needs to help make renewable energy a practical reality.
