Award

Society today faces unprecedented challenges in the areas of 1) the depletion of energy resources, 2) the increasing cost of chemicals and drugs, and 3) environmental pollution. Understanding nanoscale changes in material interfaces (gas/liquid, liquid/solid) and heterogeneous catalysts in their native working environments is key to engineering and optimizing solutions for all three of these challenges. A better understanding of the formation of gases and fluids in high-pressure geothermal systems can enable the practical application of more environmentally friendly fuels (e.g., hydrogen gas) for clean vehicles and other technologies. The development of highly effective but cheaper catalyst materials can reduce the cost of many chemicals necessary to produce cancer-treatment drugs, high-temperature lubricants, high- strength polymers, gas generation, and even catalytic converters in vehicles to reduce harmful emissions. However, there is no characterization tool that allows nanoscale probing of materials in their local reactive conditions such as at elevated pressures (above 1-2 bars) in real-time. Operando synchrotron soft X-ray based techniques such as scanning transmission x-ray microscopy (STXM) provide structural and chemical information of materials down to ~15 nm. However, current STXM characterization tools do not allow real-time analysis using multiple gases/liquids around the sample and limit the system's pressure to slightly above the ambient conditions (~ 1-2 bars). Hummingbird Scientific proposes developing and commercializing a multiport microfluidic sample holder to enable operando reaction conditions for studying materials in a high-pressure environment. In this STTR grant, we intend to collaborate with Dr. Miquel Salmeron at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) to utilize high-pressure membrane, including his recent oxide-based membranes (patent pending), to bring in the market the high-pressure microfluidic device with multiport capabilities for liquid/gas flow into the cell. The integration of the proposed product in the synchrotron beamline will allow to evaluate the material's behavior and performance suitable for many industrial applications such as chemical production, geothermal resources, and CO2 reduction, and other clean energy technologies.