Award Data

There continues to be a need for production of fuel-grade ethanol from renewable sources. Ethanol from agricultural sources has many advantages including development of fuel independence. While there continues to be a significant need for ethanol, the cost of agricultural based ethanol is quite severe although existing and new legislation provides significant incentives for its use. This program ...

Bio-oil is a liquid fuel made from biomass such as wood chips and low grade wood byproducts by fast pyrolysis process. Presence of carboxylic acids in raw-bio-oil makes the bio-oil very acidic and corrosive. Raw bio-oil has low heating value primarily because of its high water content (up to 35 %). Oligomerization aldehydes and other compounds with an unsaturated carbon bond in raw bio-oil resu ...

In crude oil refining, asphaltenes are removed from heavy oil fractions to upgrade the quality of oil by solvent-deasphalting process. Solvents used in the solvent deasphalting process are recovered by either flash evaporation or super critical extraction. These conventional solvent recovery processes are highly energy intensive because of the phase change involved in the separation process. The c ...

Industrial hydrogen production relies primarily on natural gas and hydrocarbon feedstocks to drive the various reaction chemistries that lead to hydrogen generation. Carbon dioxide, the ultimate co-product when such feedstocks and processes are employed, necessarily becomes a major contaminant of the generated hydrogen. Thus, carbon dioxide isolation and removal is an important process step in t ...

Ethylene and propylene are major chemical industry raw materials and consume a great deal of energy related to their production. Significant energy consumption is employed when cryogenically separating ethane from ethylene and propane from propylene. These cryogenic separations are difficult and are both capital and energy intensive. Membrane processes have been previously evaluated for separating ...

Several hundred beam lines are used around the world at today¿s third-generation synchrotron facilities. These facilities must deal with monochromator-based performance problems due to high heat load. Many have resorted to the use of costly, complicated, high maintenance cryogenic cooling of silicon crystals. Single crystal diamond monochromators present an advantage over the silicon crystals ...

Higher gas transport membranes would enhance membrane separations, especially those associated with energy savings (e.g., oxygen or nitrogen enriched air). In these systems, gas transport is inversely proportional to the thickness of the membrane¿s active layer. This project will explore a novel route for preparing ultrathin (100-1000 angstroms) membranes with very high selectivity. First, memb ...

Biomass fast pyrolysis fuel (BioOil) is a liquid fuel made from wood chips and the low-grade wood byproducts of timber harvesting. However, when BioOil is stored, its chemicals polymerize, aided by the oxygen present in the BioOil. As a consequence, the viscosity of the BioOil increases over time, and, under extreme conditions, it can become a solid. In addition, the presence of water results i ...

Natural gas offers cost and environmental benefits over other conventional energy sources and decreases our dependence on oil imports. However, many sources of natural gas also contain large amounts of non-hydrocarbon gases, which make them uneconomical to market. Removal of these non-hydrocarbon impurities, in order to raise low quality raw gas to pipeline quality, could have significant econom ...

There continues to be a need to produce fuel-grade ethanol from renewable sources. However, the cost of agricultural-based ethanol is quite severe, despite the fact that existing and new legislation provides significant incentives for its use. This project addresses novel routes to enhance the low-cost production of high-quality dry-fuel-grade ethanol by means of a novel water-ethanol separation ...