Siris Laursen
University of Tennessee-Knoxville, TN·Chemistry
Turning plants into fuels and chemicals leaves behind watery waste streams full of polyols. Polyols are sugar-like molecules with many oxygen-containing groups.
- Fields
Chemistry
Engineering
Materials Science
- Topics
heterogeneous catalysis
intermetallic compounds
non-noble metal catalysts
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2027
What they work on
- Determine how the composition of non-noble metal intermetallic compounds controls their activity for removing oxygen from polyols such as glycerol, using quantum chemical surface modeling and experiments.
- Identify the surface chemistry that partially or fully deoxygenates polyols into diols like 1,2-propanediol and olefins like propene, while limiting carbon-carbon bond breaking and olefin hydrogenation.
- Find intermetallic compositions with more aggressive surface chemistry that break polyols down completely into hydrogen and CO.
- Trace catalyst behavior to its atomic and electronic origins to derive simple design rules for earth-abundant catalysts.
More about the research
Glycerol from biodiesel production is a common example. A biorefinery that uses every part of the biomass needs cheap catalysts, materials that speed up reactions without being used up. These catalysts must turn such waste into useful building-block chemicals.
Why it matters
Inexpensive, earth-abundant catalysts could turn waste from biomass pyrolysis and biodiesel production into valuable chemicals such as 1,2-propanediol and propene. This could make integrated biorefineries more practical and support renewable chemical industries. The design rules developed here could also guide catalyst discovery for other reactions that still lack good catalysts.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Michele Sarazen
Princeton University, NJ·Engineering·Early-career
Make hierarchical bifunctional zeolites, which combine tiny and larger pores with metal and acid sites, and test how their pore structure and connectivity change rates of polyolefin hydrocracking and catalyst deactivation.
David Flaherty
Georgia Institute of Technology, GA·Chemistry
Synthesize gold-rich alloy nanoparticles containing palladium, platinum or rhodium at diameters of about 1–2, 6 and 10 nm, and track how gas adsorption and reactions restructure them over extended periods.
Paul Chirik
Princeton University, NJ·Chemistry
Discover robust iron and cobalt catalyst precursors in several oxidation states, using oxidatively-induced reductive elimination and arene displacement from metal sandwich compounds.
The school
University of Tennessee-Knoxville: 16 labs on PI Pages, $387M a year on research, 426 research doctorates a year.
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