CBE Seminar: Sustainable Manufacturing of Chemicals and Nanomaterials

Non-UCI people, please use this registration link: https://forms.gle/iic8wF3WEMNwZgSx5

Abstract: Excessive anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and the associated undesired effects of climate change, global warming, and erratic weather patterns necessitate a global transition to a more energy-efficient, sustainable society. This presentation will first highlight electrochemical manufacturing of chemicals from renewable feedstocks. Our efforts on synthesis / assembly / characterization / testing of catalysts, electrodes, electrolysis reactor designs, and process intensification approaches have led to several promising systems for the electroreduction of CO² to chemicals such as CO, ethylene, and ethanol on the cathode, as well is the same in co-conversion with the oxidation of biomass adducts like glycerol to value-added products on the anode. We applied technoeconomic and life-cycle analysis to evaluate the different processes for application in chemical manufacturing at scale. 

The second part will cover autonomous flow synthesis systems for the efficient discovery and production of nanomaterials such as quantum dots that enable the energy-efficient high-tech applications that our modern society demands. Precise control over temperature and residence time made possible in multi-zone continuous flow reactor designs provides improved control over the composition, size and shape of semiconducting nanoparticles that are key for their optical properties. Automation of all components, inclusion of inline spectroscopic characterization and automated spectral analysis, as well as ensemble neural network-based machine learning enabled fully autonomous discovery and mapping of synthesis space.

Bio: Paul J.A. Kenis is the Elio E. Tarika Endowed Chair, a professor, and serves as the head of the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He is also an investigator in the International Institute for Carbon-Neutral Energy Research between Kyushu University in Japan and UIUC. He received his B.S. degree in chemistry from Nijmegen Radboud University and his Ph.D. degree in chemical engineering from the University of Twente, both in the Netherlands, after which he was a postdoc at Harvard University.

Kenis, author of over 200 publications and 14 patents, has been recognized with a 3M young faculty award, a NSF CAREER award, a Xerox award, the ECS Energy Technology Division research award, and he has been elected a fellow of the ECS. He is also a co-author of reports on the prospects of CO² utilization at scale issued by the U.S. National Academies as well as the global Mission Innovation consortium.  

At Illinois Kenis research program pursues microchemical systems with a range of applications including fuel cells, CO² electrolysis, protein / pharmaceutical crystallization, and cell biology studies. His current research efforts include (i) autonomous, automated continuous flow reactors for the discovery and synthesis optimization of nanomaterials such as quantum dots for optical applications and (ii) co-electrolysis processes for sustainable chemical manufacturing. The latter pursues suitable catalysts, electrodes, and electrolyzer designs, determining suitable operation conditions, and performing techno-economic and life-cycle analyses to guide the development of electrolysis systems that use renewable feedstocks such as CO² and biomass processing adducts for future sustainable (low/no-carbon emitting) chemical manufacturing.

Host: Professor Plamen Atanassov and Professor Iryna Zenyuk