by Kate Nelson

PULLMAN, WA – Ethanol from garbage and other sources could replace fossil fuels in the manufacturing of plastics, rubber, and other chemicals if scientists can gain the needed knowledge of catalysis.

WSU Professors Yong Wang and Junming Sun are conducting research and have developed a one-step process for upgrading ethanol to isobutene, an important first step in turning bio-ethanol into other useful, petroleum-based products.

In an article which recently appeared in the journal ACS Catalysis, the researchers provided an overview of work to convert ethanol to valuable chemicals and identified future research directions, including one-step ethanol conversions. Wang is the Voiland Distinguished Professor in the Voiland School of Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering as well as associate director at the Institute for Integrated Catalysis at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Sun is a research professor at WSU.

Renewable fuel requirements are increasing the availability and decreasing the cost of ethanol, with the production in the United States expected to reach more than 30 billion gallons in 2017.

With only 15 to 16 billion gallons needed for fuel blending, the additional alcohol could be used to produce plastic water bottles, carpet backing, and thousands of other products. Wang and Sun’s study provided a detailed summary of the research, giving scientists a needed overview.

“We need to de-bottleneck the process, from lignocellulose to the end products,” said Wang.

In the article, the team reviewed the progress made on deconstructing ethanol to provide hydrogen for use in proton exchange membrane fuel cells. Ethanol is of interest because of its easy-to-use form, nontoxicity, and high hydrogen content. Highly stable and selective catalysts, based on cobalt and other earth-abundant metals, appear promising for hydrogen production. Yet, efficiency and deactivation issues remain.

The team also discussed the production of light olefins, which can be used for building alkenes, alkanes, and aromatics, which are longer chained or ring-structured hydrocarbons. For example, producing the light olefin using gamma aluminum oxide is a commercial success. However, the reaction requires high temperatures when water is present. Questions remain, including the formatting of key intermediates, which inhibit the effective conversion of ethanol.

“Olefins are exciting because they are a nice platform molecule that can be further converted to other chemicals,” said Wang. “Essentially, the potential is great, but if you look at the current status, a significant amount of research is needed before commercialization.”

The researchers are continuing to better understand the catalysts and the reaction mechanisms involved, including the influence of impurities introduced with the bioethanol. They are also looking at the coupling thermochemical conversions to biological processes that produce the ethanol.

Biofuels are produced from plant-derived biomass through the breakdown of the plant cell wall, which contains sugars that can be used for energy. A considerable amount of effort has been directed to developing effective enzymes for degrading the cell wall, but the development of more efficient and cost-effective enzymes for biomass-to-biofuel conversion has been limited for several reasons. For one, it is not well understood how enzymes interact with biomass substrates, which have highly complex and heterogeneous physical and chemical properties. Moreover, there is a lack of adequate biomass model substrates for evaluating the efficacy of different enzymes.

To address this problem, researchers from Washington State University, in collaboration with scientists from EMSL, have developed a set of biomass reference substrates with controlled physical and chemical properties which can be used to identify specific deficiencies of cellulase enzymes in breaking down carbohydrate polymers. In a new study, the researchers used these reference substrates to test the effectiveness of three commercially available enzyme mixtures—Novozymes Cellic® Ctec2, Dupont Accellerase® 1500, and DSM Cytolase CL—using X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction and an atomic force microscope at EMSL, the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, a DOE national scientific user facility.

View entire story at EMSL website

by Alyssa Patrick

PULLMAN, WA – A small Christmas tree on the Washington State University campus is drawing some extra attention, and it’s not because it’s covered in Cougar paraphernalia.

A professor set up the decoration to draw more interest to chemical engineering.

Now that the semester is over, it’s pretty quiet on the Washington State University Campus. But the Christmas spirit is stirring here in the chemical engineering department.

“Just the lights, attract the people, attract the students. Give them a spark,” said WSU Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering Haluk Beyenal.

This tinsel tree isn’t very large or bright. But its lights are powered by a bucket of dirty water, and it helps Associate Professor Haluk Beyenal teach students about the transfer of electrons.

“When I start to talk about electron transfer, they got bored,” said Beyenal. “So I start with this microbial fuel cells and then talk about this Christmas tree, how it’s lit up.”

So here’s how it works. The microbial fuel cell is in this bucket of dirty water. The wires connect it to a circuit, which powers the lights.”

“Microbial fuel cell, it’s a device which converts chemical energy to electricity,” said Beyenal.

Beyenal said the fuel cells use bacteria in the dirt to constantly create a small amount of electricity, and that electricity can be stored to create a higher voltage less often.

“It depends how much power you want,” said Beyenal. “If you need less power, you can transfer it very often, if you need really high power, you can transfer it every one hour, maybe once in a day.”

He said devices like this could be used to monitor environmental conditions in bodies of water over long periods of time, without the hassle of having to change a battery.

“Everyone talks about global warming,” said Beyenal. “Ya, we are suspicious it is happening, but do we have enough data? In the past, we did not, and now we are developing tools to monitor environment.”

These microbial fuel cells have a long list of real-world applications, but Beyenal said they’re also useful for getting more students on campus interested in science.

“If we train them on new subjects and attract them to a science, it’s a good success,” said Beyenal. “It’s a success for us.”

This is the second year that the microbial fuel cell Christmas tree has been on display in the chemical engineering department, and they say they hope to put up a larger one next year.

One of the Voiland School’s graduate students received a top poster award at the recent American Association for Aerosol Research annual conference held last week in Portland, Oregon.

Courtney Herring, a graduate student in the Voiland School of Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering, is investigating the chemical composition of diesel and gasoline exhaust mixtures. Herring conducted a series of experiments at the Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute in New Mexico, running engines under a variety of conditions to see how the chemical composition of the exhaust changed. Led by Timothy VanReken, in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, the researchers are studying the link between health concerns and specific chemicals in the exhaust. In particular, the researchers are measuring what engine conditions might contribute to or worsen the formation of cancer-causing compounds. Researchers at WSU are involved in the project because of their ability to accurately measure gas and the particle phase of the exhaust. The work is part of a large project funded by the Environmental Protection Agency.

View full article at WSU News ↗

PULLMAN, Wash. – Washington State University Voiland Distinguished Professor Yong Wang was elected a Fellow of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) in May, just a couple months after being named a fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC).

Wang’s major advisor Bill Thomson nominated him for the honor.

“When working with Yong I mostly brought him the resources he needed, and then just tried to stay out of the way. He surpassed me quickly and now is probably one of the most notable catalyst researchers in the world,” Thomson said.

Wang received his master’s and doctoral degrees in Chemical Engineering from WSU’s Gene and Linda Voiland School of Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering. His research focuses mainly on the development of novel catalytic materials and reaction engineering for the conversion of fossil and biomass feedstocks to fuels and chemicals.

Wang holds a joint appointment with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) as well, where he is a Laboratory Fellow and Associate Director of PNNL’s Institute for Integrated Catalysis. He was named the PNNL Inventor of the Year twice. His research on energy and renewable fuels is known around the world and has led him to publish 165 peer-reviewed articles, hold 86 issued U.S. patents, and earn several awards, including three prestigious R&D 100 awards. The Chinese Institute of Engineers named him the 2006 Asian American Engineer of the Year and he is also a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and a fellow of the American Chemical Society (ACS).

The AIChE is a professional society with more than 45,000 members from more than 90 countries. According to the AIChE website, members are eligible to become fellows when they have significant chemical engineering practice (generally 25 years), and have made distinctive professional accomplishments and contributions. Wang will be presented with his honor at the upcoming AIChE meeting in November 2013 in San Francisco, California.

Find this news release at WSU News online at http://bit.ly/10Ni4hK

PULLMAN, Wash.— Chinese major John Stark is Washington State University’s newest Boren Scholar to receive federal funding to study a foreign language abroad, and chemical engineering student Monica Bomber has been named a Boren alternate.

With his Boren funding, Stark, a senior, will further his mastery of Mandarin to fulfill his passion for language and prepare him “to be valuable to the U.S. in areas of defense and diplomacy.” Bomber, a sophomore, would use Boren support to study Swahili in class and throughout an internship, intent on learning to design cost-effective water purification plants in East Africa. Both are members of the Honors College at WSU.

Boren Scholarships provide up to $20,000 to American undergraduate college students to study less-commonly-taught languages in about 90 world regions critical to U.S. interests but underrepresented in study abroad. These include Africa, Asia, Central and Eastern Europe, Eurasia, Latin America, and the Middle East. Among the nearly 65 preferred languages are Arabic, Chinese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Swahili. For 2013–14, 161 of 947 undergraduates applying for Boren Scholarships received the award; in exchange for the funding, recipients agree to work in the federal government for at least one year.

Boren programs are sponsored by the National Security Education Program and named for David L. Boren, principal author of federal legislation that created the program in 1991. A former Democratic governor and state senator from Oklahoma, he was the longest serving chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Intelligence; currently he is president of the University of Oklahoma and co-chair of the nonpartisan U.S. President’s Intelligence Advisory Board.

Stark began his study of Mandarin/Chinese at WSU; Boren support will take him to the International Chinese Language Program at National Taiwan University in Taipei, Taiwan. A graduate of Newport High School in Newport, Wash., he plans to work in the intelligence community.

In her Boren application, Bomber expressed a desire to study Swahili (aka KiSwahili) at the Knowledge Exchange Institute at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. A graduate of Hudson’s Bay High School in Vancouver, she will depart for the Tanzania program in late May, although she may not have a Boren Scholarship or funding in time. The eight-week summer program will be spent half in language and culture classes, and half at an internship with an organization involved in water resources. The experience aligns with her future academic plans in engineering and the Honors College back at WSU.

Creating and protecting sustainable water systems in developing countries is a goal of the U.S. Department of State, says Bomber, who plans to work one day in its Foreign Service sector as an economics officer.

For more information on the Boren and other prestigious scholarships, visit the WSU Distinguished Scholarships website at http://universitycollege.wsu.edu/units/distinguishedscholarshipadvising/.

CONTACT: Sarah Ann Hones, Distinguished Scholarships Director, University College at WSU, 509-335-8239, shones@su.edu

MEDIA: Beverly Makhani, Communications Director, University College at WSU, 509-335-6679, Makhani@wsu.edu