Credit: NC State
Chemical engineering scientists have actually established a brand-new driver that considerably increases yield in styrene production, while at the same time decreasing energy usage and greenhouse gas emissions.
“Styrene is a synthetic chemical that is used to make a variety of plastics, resins and other materials,” states Fanxing Li, matching author of the work and Alcoa Professor of Chemical Engineering at North Carolina State University. “Because it is in such widespread use, we are pleased that we could develop a technology that is cost effective and will reduce the environmental impact of styrene manufacturing.” Industry approximates anticipate that producers will be producing more than 33 million lots of styrene each year by 2023.
Conventional styrene production innovations have a single-pass yield of about 54%. In other words, for every single 100 systems of feedstock you take into the procedure, you would get 54 systems of styrene out of each pass. Using their brand-new driver, the scientists had the ability to attain a single-pass yield of 91%.
The conversion procedure happens at 500-600 degrees Celsius – the very same temperature level variety as traditional styrene production procedures. However, there is a huge distinction.
“Current techniques require injecting very large volumes of steam into the reactor where the conversion takes place,” states Yunfei Gao, a postdoctoral scholar at NC State and co-lead author of a paper on the work. “Our technique requires no steam. In practical terms, this drastically reduces the amount of energy needed to perform the conversion.”
Specifically, the conversion procedure that includes the brand-new driver usages 82% less energy – and lowers co2 emissions by 79%.
“These advances are made possible by the engineered design of the catalyst itself,” states Xing Zhu, co-lead author of the paper and a scientist at the Kunming University of Science and Technology (KUST). “The new redox catalyst has a potassium ferrite surface for the catalytic phase and a mixed calcium manganese oxide core for lattice oxygen storage.” Zhu dealt with the job as a going to scholar at NC State.
“In order to adopt the new catalyst, styrene manufacturers would need to adopt a different style of reactor than they are currently using,” Li states. “They would need something similar to a CATOFIN® reactor. But those are already in widespread use for other industrial applications. And the cost savings from the new process should be significant.”
The paper, “A tailored multi-functional catalyst for ultra-efficient styrene production under a cyclic redox scheme,” is released in the journal Nature Communications. The paper is co-authored by Xijun Wang, Vasudev Haribal, Junchen Liu, and Luke Neal of NC State; Zhenghong Bao and Zili Wu of Oak Ridge National Laboratory; and Hua Wang of KUST.
Reference: “A tailored multi-functional catalyst for ultra-efficient styrene production under a cyclic redox scheme” by Xing Zhu, Yunfei Gao, Xijun Wang, Vasudev Haribal, Junchen Liu, Luke M. Neal, Zhenghong Bao, Zili Wu, Hua Wang and Fanxing Li, 26 February 2021, Nature Communications.
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-21374-2
The research study was finished with assistance from the U.S. Department of Energy, under FAST subaward DE-EE0007888-05-6; the National Science Foundation, under grant number 1923468; and the Kenan Institute for Engineering, Technology and Science at NC State.
The scientists have actually gotten a patent for the brand-new innovation.
