Researchers have designed a catalyst that converts biomass into fuel sources with remarkably high efficiency and offers new possibilities for manufacturing advanced renewable materials.
- Zeolite is a common porous material used in commercial catalysis to provide information for maximizing its performance.
- The optimized catalyst, called NbAlS-1, converts biomass-derived raw materials into light olefins- a class of petrochemicals such as ethene, propene, and butene, used to make plastics and liquid fuels.
- The new catalyst has an impressive yield of more than 99% but requires significantly less energy compared to its predecessors.
- This new catalyst directly converts raw oxygenated compounds using much milder conditions and with significantly less energy and is more environmentally friendly.
Biomass is organic matter that can be converted and used for fuel and feedstock. It is commonly derived from leftover agricultural waste such as wood, grass, and straw that gets broken down and fed into a catalyst that converts it to butene an energy-rich gas used by the chemical and petroleum industries to make plastics, polymers and liquid fuels that are otherwise produced from oil.
A chemical reaction requires a tremendous amount of energy to break the strong bonds formed from elements such as carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen. Some bonds might require heating them to 1,000°C (more than 1,800°F) and hotter before the bonds are broken.
The VISION spectrometer at ORNL's Spallation Neutron Source enabled the researchers to determine precisely which chemical bonds were present and how they were behaving based on the bonds vibrational signatures. That information allowed them to reconstruct the chemical sequence needed to optimize the catalyst's performance.
Synchrotron X-ray diffraction measurements at the UK's Diamond Light Source were used to determine the catalyst's atomic structure and complementary neutron scattering measurements were made at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory's ISIS Neutron and Muon Source.
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