The Department of Energy is organizing the seminar Engineering Active Oxygens for Chemical Separations and Catalysis presented by Prof. Praveen Bollini, University of Houston.

Oxygen atoms are ubiquitous components in materials employed toward chemical separations and catalysis applications. Examples include oxygen species present in supports used to immobilize amines for direct air capture, and active oxygen sites that participate in Mars-van Krevelen cycles that mediate the partial oxidation of light alkanes over oxide catalysts. In this talk, I will discuss two distinct applications in which highly contrasting approaches are employed to fully exploit the chemical properties of active oxygens, and in which key challenges can be overcome by understanding and engineering the physicochemical properties of these oxygens.

The first is the direct capture of CO2 from ambient air and its conversion to methane. Porous metal (hydr)oxides will be presented as a novel class of direct air capture sorbents in which aliovalent doping can be used to tune binding energies of CO2, and to render practicable the first instance of a dual-function capture and conversion material that is single-component in composition. The second example will focus on using dynamic operation to improve performance in the oxidative dehydrogenation of ethane to ethylene over supported Mo and V catalysts. I will demonstrate how an accurate understanding of the interplay between transport phenomena and reaction kinetics facilitates the development of approaches for improving ethylene selectivity despite the absence of kinetic artifacts such as non-zero oxygen pressure dependencies.

These contrasting approaches capture the diverse range of length and time scales over which physicochemical phenomena need to be understood in an effort to address grand challenges such as CO2 capture from ambient air and the catalytic conversion of natural gas to value-added chemical products.

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