University of Wisconsin-Madisson
Sobre o palestrante
George Willis Huber is the Richard Antoine Professor of Chemical Engineering at University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research focus is the design of disruptive technologies for the conversion of biomass, waste plastics and other waste resources into renewable fuels and chemicals. He has won several awards including the AICHE Colburn award and the top 100 people in Bioenergy by Biofuels Digest. He has been named a “highly-cited researcher” in the area of Chemistry an award given to the top 1% most cited chemists. He has published over 200 papers, more than 20 patent applications, and received over 40,000 citations. He is co-founder of Anellotech (www.anellotech.com) and Pyran (www.pyranco.com). He is the director of the $12.5 million Center on Chemical Upcycling of Waste Plastics (CUWP) which was funded in 2021. Professor Huber has received visiting professorships from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2015 (at Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics), from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019-20 and the ExxonMobil Visiting Chair Professor at National University of Singapore in 2019. George did a post-doctoral stay with Avelino Corma at the Technical Chemical Institute at the Polytechnical University of Valencia, Spain (UPV-CSIC). He obtained his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from University of Wisconsin-Madison (2005). He obtained his B.S. (1999) and M.S.(2000) degrees in Chemical Engineering from Brigham Young University.
Palestra: Production of diesel and jet fuel from ethanol
Resumo da palestra: Ethanol is the most abundantly produced liquid fuel derived from biomass and used as a blendstock for gasoline-powered vehicles. It is projected that in the future demand for gasoline will decrease and demand for C8-22 distillate range-fuels such diesel and jet fuels will increase [1]. As we will show in this presentation, ethanol can be converted to higher linear and α-branched alcohols by C-C coupling reactions (ethanol oligomerization) as well as to high molecular weight esters by C-O coupling reactions with Cu/MgxAlOy (CuHT) catalysts. Alcohols may be converted to ethers via bimolecular dehydration in a subsequent step [2]. In this presentation we will study the effect of BET surface area and Cu loading of the CuHT catalysts with Cu loadings up to 1.5wt% on other catalyst properties (active site counts) and on the product selectivity. We have identified more than 160 number of species in the products including alcohols, esters, aldehydes, ketonces, and olefins. Alcohols range from C4 to C10. Both alcohols and esters follow a Schulz-Flory chain growht model. We show the relationship between the catalyst properties (BET surface area, acid and base site count and Cu loading and synthesis method) and the performance in the reactions. We also show that physical mixtures of CuHT and HT can have similar product selectivity of low loading CuHT catalysts. Finally, we demonstrate that diesel fuel precursor (C4+ alcohols, aldehydes and ketones, C6+ esters and ethers) selectivities over 70% can be obtained at all conversion ranges with all the materials with Cu loadings below 0.6wt%, with the selectivity value and the product molecular weights increasing with conversion%.
