Description:

The Chemical and Biological Engineering Department is pleased to present a seminar by Suljo Linic, Martin Lewis Perl Collegiate Professor of Chemical Engineering at The University of Michigan.

Suljo Linic will present a seminar titled "Chemical catalysis and environment: the good, the bad, the ugly and the path forward.”

ABSTRACT

I will discuss the historical links between chemical engineering, chemistry, energy systems, and environmental sustainability. I will outline the transformative potential of chemical catalysis in the design of sustainable energy systems and the key limitations preventing us from taking advantage of this potential. I will outline some promising directions, focusing on one specific avenue that we have been exploring. In this context, I will discuss our recent work on developing multifunctional catalytic materials that allow for not only the control over the structure of the active catalytic site but also the environment in which this active site resides. By controlling the environment, we are able to control the chemical potential of reactive species and therefore direct chemical transformations in specific (desired) directions. 

I will illustrate the phenomena using examples of developing catalyst/membrane multifunctional systems for oxidative coupling of methane (OCM) and propane dehydrogenation (PDH). OCM is a direct route for converting methane into ethylene and ethane (C2). When performed in conventional packed bed reactors (PBRs) this process suffers from significant thermodynamic and kinetic limitations over almost all explored catalysts.  We will show that a membrane/catalyst system with distributed oxygen feed (i.e. an O2- conducting membrane reactor) and properly selected catalyst and membrane materials can give significantly higher C2 selectivity and yield compared to a PBR. In another example, we will focus on PDH. The conversion in the PDH reaction is equilibrium limited. We will show how membrane/catalyst systems allow us to in-situ remove H2 from the product stream and by taking advantage of the Le Chatelier's principle remove the equilibrium limitations on the reaction conversion. 

BIO

Suljo Linic was born in northwestern Bosnia and Herzegovina, where he completed his elementary and high school education. His family were forcefully displaced from Bosnia during the Bosnian war of 1990s. He moved to the USA in 1994 after being awarded a faculty scholarship from West Chester University (West Chester, PA).  He completed his BS degree in Physics with minors in Mathematics and Chemistry at West Chester University (PA) in the spring of 1998. Suljo obtained his PhD degree in chemical engineering in 2003 working with Prof. Mark Barteau at University of Delaware, specializing in surface and colloidal chemistry and heterogeneous catalysis. He was a Max Planck postdoctoral fellow with Prof. Dr. Matthias Scheffler at the Fritz Haber Institute of Max Planck Society in Berlin (Germany), working on first principles studies of surface chemistry. He started his independent faculty career in 2004 at the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor where he is currently Martin Lewis Perl Collegiate Professor of Chemical Engineering. He was also a Hans Fischer Faculty Fellow from 2015 to 2019 at the Department of Chemistry at Technical University in Munich. 

Suljo’s research has been recognized through multiple awards including the Gabor A. Somorjai Award by ACS, the Emmett Award by The North American Catalysis Society, the ACS Catalysis Lectureship for the Advancement of Catalytic Science awarded annually by the ACS Catalysis journal and Catalysis Science and Technology Division of ACS, the Nanoscale Science and Engineering Forum Young Investigator Award by American Institute of Chemical Engineers, the ACS Unilever Award awarded by the Colloids and Surface Science Division of ACS, the Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award awarded by the Dreyfus Foundation, the DuPont Young Professor Award, and a NSF Career Award. Suljo has presented more than 200 invited and keynote lectures. He serves as the associate editor of ACS catalysis journal.

Bagels and coffee will be provided at 9:30am, and the seminar will start at 9:40am. Please plan to arrive on time to grab a bagel and mingle!

*Please note that there will be no Zoom option for seminars this year.