SBIR Phase I: Improved Catalysts for Sanitizer Ethanol Production (COVID-19)

SBIR 第一阶段：改进的用于消毒剂乙醇生产的催化剂 (COVID-19)

• 批准号: 2035588
• 负责人: Stafford Sheehan
• 金额: $ 25.6万
• 依托单位: AIR COMPANY HOLDINGS, INC.
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2021
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2021-05-15 至 2021-10-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2035588&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: SBIR; Phase; Improved; Catalysts; Sanitizer

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) project is to scale a renewable technology. The proposed system uses renewable energy to convert carbon dioxide and water into value-added chemicals with the only byproduct being oxygen. This approach has the potential to make chemicals and fuels that consume and prevent greenhouse gas emissions. Unique to this process is production of the world’s first carbon-negative alcohols. These can be used as feedstock for materials including consumer goods, bioplastics, and fuel, both more sustainably and at a cost potentially lower than any other technologies in use today. The system’s most critical component is a proprietary catalyst that transforms carbon dioxide into alcohols, namely ethanol, using only earth-abundant elements and avoiding the use of precious metals. This SBIR project will focus on significantly improving these earth-abundant catalysts to reduce the cost of sustainable chemical production. This SBIR project proposes to make transformative improvements to heterogeneous catalyst efficiency and yield for ethanol production. In doing so, it will improve understanding of how carbon dioxide interacts with the metals in novel heterogeneous catalysts. The new industrial chemical process produces ethanol from carbon dioxide in a single step. This process produces the first and only lifecycle carbon-negative ethanol to date, with the potential to be more energy efficient than legacy and state-of-the-art renewable ethanol processes. The proposed novel catalysts enable new conversion phenomena not observed previously, which presents a challenge toward improving and scaling catalyst production. This project will study variants of the catalyst under varied pressure, temperature, flow rate, and other conditions along with chemical characterization to better understand how carbon dioxide and hydrogen bind to the catalyst surface. This data will be used to iterate and improve rate and selectivity toward production of USP grade ethanol.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.

该小企业创新研究 (SBIR) 项目更广泛的影响/商业潜力是扩大可再生技术的规模。 拟议的系统使用可再生能源将二氧化碳和水转化为增值化学品，唯一的副产品是氧气。这种方法有可能制造消耗和防止温室气体排放的化学品和燃料。该工艺的独特之处在于生产了世界上第一种负碳醇。这些可用作消费品、生物塑料和燃料等材料的原料，比当今使用的任何其他技术更可持续，而且成本可能更低。该系统最关键的组件是一种专有催化剂，它仅使用地球上丰富的元素并将二氧化碳转化为醇，即乙醇，并避免使用贵金属。该 SBIR 项目将侧重于显着改进这些地球上丰富的催化剂，以降低可持续化学生产的成本。该 SBIR 项目提议对乙醇生产的多相催化剂效率和产量进行变革性改进。这样做将增进对二氧化碳如何与新型多相催化剂中的金属相互作用的理解。新的工业化学工艺一步即可从二氧化碳中生产乙醇。该工艺生产迄今为止第一个也是唯一一个生命周期负碳乙醇，具有比传统和最先进的可再生乙醇工艺更高的能源效率。 所提出的新型催化剂能够实现以前未观察到的新转化现象，这对改进和扩大催化剂生产提出了挑战。该项目将研究催化剂在不同压力、温度、流速和其他条件下的变体以及化学表征，以更好地了解二氧化碳和氢气如何与催化剂表面结合。这些数据将用于迭代和提高 USP 级乙醇的生产速度和选择性。该奖项反映了 NSF 的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。