I-Corps: Aerogels - A Catalyst for Cleaner Air

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The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project is to develop aerogel-based catalysts as a sustainable, environmentally friendly material for pollution mitigation applications. These materials could reduce or even eliminate the use of expensive precious metals such as platinum, palladium and rhodium that are currently used in automotive exhaust after-treatment systems. Thus, aerogel catalysts could have a significant positive economic and environmental impact on this nation. Commercialization of these novel materials will extend the design space available to pollution-control system engineers, and hence open new, potentially transformative, avenues for meeting current and future pollution regulations. In addition, this project will enable undergraduate students to develop entrepreneurial ideas and learn what is involved in bringing technology developed through fundamental research to the marketplace.This I-Corps project will explore commercial opportunities for catalytic aerogels. Aerogels are materials with remarkable properties, including unusually high surface area, low density, low thermal conductivity and a nanoporous structure that is stable at high temperatures. Aerogels can be fabricated using a rapid supercritical extraction method and tailored to contain different catalytic metal species such as copper, cobalt, vanadia and alumina. Research in this area is focused on developing methods for making different types of catalytic aerogels and on testing their effectiveness in pollution mitigation applications. Catalytic testing of copper-alumina aerogels under simulated automotive exhaust conditions has demonstrated that they are capable of converting unburned hydrocarbons, nitrogen oxides and carbon monoxide into less harmful gases.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.