International Research Fellowship Program: Homogeneous Catalysis in Supercritical Fluids: Density Effects and Multiphase Processing

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0202714ScurtoThe International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program's awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad.This award will support a twelve month research fellowship by Dr. Aaron M. Scurto to work with Dr. Walter Leitner at the Max Plank Institut fur Kohlenforschung in Germany.A goal of this project is to create technically feasible and economical replacement processes for traditional environmentally polluting solvent systems. The project will work to optimize the production of a certain ring-forming compound using homogeneous catalysis in supercritical fluids. A homogeneous catalyst is usually a chemically-active metal that has been bonded to organic molecules rendering it soluble in a supercritical fluid phase with the reactants. Its purpose is to accelerate the reaction and to selectively yield one product over other byproducts. A catalyst will be molecularly engineered to be both soluble in a supercritical fluid phase and selective for the compound. The sensitivity of the product formation to density will be investigated. It is believed that clustering of the reactants at lower pressures produces one product, while higher pressures produce a different species. Another approach will be to create a catalyst that is soluble in ionic liquids but not in supercritical CO2. Ionic liquids are salts that are liquid at room temperature and neither evaporates nor dissolves in supercritical fluids. Thus the catalyst promotes the reaction in the ionic liquid, and only the products and reactants are soluble in the supercritical fluid phase, not the ionic liquid or catalyst. This two-phase system will be used to develop a continuous process, which is highly desirable for industry.Dr. Leitner is one of the seminal researchers in the area of homogeneous catalysis in supercritical fluids.