GOALI: Promotion Mechanisms of Supported Ag/Al2O3 Catalysts for Selective Ethylene Epoxidation

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Ethylene oxide (EO) is a major industrial chemical intermediate used for the production of many consumer products (e.g., sterilization of heat sensitive tools in hospitals and medical equipment, pharmaceuticals, detergents, antifreeze, plastics, etc.) as well as numerous non-consumer chemicals. The great demand for EO makes it one of the highest production volume chemicals with US production leading the rest of the world. The catalyst market for EO is highly competitive with small increases in catalyst efficiency accounting for significant profits due to its large production volume. This NSF Grant Opportunities for Academic Liaison with Industry (GOALI) project establishes collaboration between Scientific Design Company, Inc. (SDCI, a small domestic EO catalyst manufacturer and engineering process designer) and Lehigh University (LU, a research institution with leading edge catalyst research capabilities). The SDCI-LU partnership will advance science and engineering of EO technology and infuse fundamental research activities into a small US manufacturing company. Successful outcome will reduce ethylene oxide manufacturing cost, increase US manufacturing jobs, and reduce undesirable CO2 emissions.Although silver catalysts for ethylene oxidation have received much attention over the years, there have been only a handful of studies on the role of promoters on the performance of industrial-type alumina-supported silver catalysts (promoters increase the EO selectivity from ~50 to ~90%). The SDCI-LU partnership will focus on the molecular level understanding of the promotion mechanisms for alumina-supported silver catalysts to establish fundamental structure-activity/selectivity relationships and microkinetic models to guide catalyst and process improvements. SDCI will prepare and test the catalysts under industrial reaction conditions, with LU students involved in these activities, and SDCI researchers and engineers will jointly supervise the LU graduate students. LU has state-of-the-art instrumentation and expertise for catalyst characterization under reaction conditions (in situ and operando spectroscopy). The experimental studies will be complemented with cutting edge theoretical modeling studies that will allow understanding the fundamentals of how catalyst structure and composition affect activity and EO selectivity. Such new and unprecedented fundamental insights are poised to reveal the role of promoters on alumina-supported silver catalysts for EO and establish a molecular-based kinetic model for ethylene oxidation by promoted alumina-supported silver catalysts. The SDCI-LU partnership will train and educate students that will recruited from underrepresented groups, expose students and faculty to industrial catalyst development and engineering, and expose industrial researchers and engineers to modern catalysis and engineering research. The information to be generated will be widely disseminated throughout the scientific community by presentations, publications, websites, and integration into LU curricula and several outreach activities to underrepresented groups.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.