The Department of Energy announced renewed funding of an interdisciplinary team of researchers at UMass Amherst in chemistry and chemical engineering, studying new ways to fabricate nanoporous zeolite crystals with targeted defect patterns, which hold promise for producing carbon-neutral biofuels and capturing carbon dioxide.
This research into how zeolite crystals form is critical for learning how to make the materials of the future for combating climate change – targeted structures to revolutionize the sustainable production of both chemicals and fuels,” said Scott Auerbach, professor of chemistry at UMass Amherst and the principal investigator of the project.
“This Department of Energy grant allows us to examine the new synthesis pathway for a wide range of different zeolite architectures, and to probe with atomic detail why this new pathway is faster and how it places defects into crystals,” said Wei Fan, professor of chemical engineering at UMass Amherst and the project’s co-principal investigator.
In the end, the team aims to generate new approaches for designing the synthesis of targeted zeolite materials, with desired amounts of defects inside the crystals.
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