2007 Spring Symposium

 
Den­nis J. Miller
Depart­ment of Chem­i­cal Engi­neer­ing and Mate­ri­als Sci­ence
Michi­gan State Uni­ver­si­ty
East Lans­ing, Michi­gan 48824
(517) 353‑3928
millerd@​egr.​msu.​edu

Abstract — Reduc­tion of oxy­genat­ed bio­mass sub­strates will be a core process in the inte­grat­ed biore­fin­ery in order to pro­duce a suite of petro­le­um analogs for indus­tri­al and con­sumer prod­ucts. In our lab­o­ra­to­ry, we have exam­ined in detail the hydro­gena­tion and hydrogenol­y­sis of bio­mass-derived poly­ols and car­boxylic acids as plat­form inter­me­di­ates for a vari­ety of prod­uct species. This work has involved both fun­da­men­tal efforts to under­stand reac­tion mech­a­nism and sub­strate-cat­a­lyst inter­ac­tions and applied stud­ies to char­ac­ter­ize the effect of sol­vent, sub­strate adsorp­tion, and cat­a­lyst sup­port prop­er­ties. This talk will review our recent find­ings on sev­er­al reac­tion sys­tems includ­ing glyc­erol hydrogenol­y­sis to propy­lene gly­col and lac­tic acid and pro­pi­onic acid hydro­gena­tion to alco­hols. We will illus­trate that car­ry­ing out het­ero­ge­neous cat­alyt­ic reac­tions in aque­ous solu­tion, the “native” reac­tion sol­vent for biore­new­able feed­stocks, pos­es a dif­fer­ent set of chal­lenges than do tra­di­tion­al petro­le­um-based cat­alyt­ic reac­tions.