Current Position: Research Engineer, General Motors

B.S.E. Thesis Research:

Our current energy resources are finite, and this poses a problem due to increasing energy demands and requirements in the next few decades. As such, much energy research has been focused on the development and production of renewable energy sources, such as biofuels. Today, ethanol is the primary biofuel of choice, and it is produced in greater quantities compared to other biofuels. However, ethanol has its limitations, in particular: 1) it cannot be a complete replacement for gasoline (only 10-15% of ethanol can be blended into gasoline in current vehicles) and 2) due to its highly corrosive and water-absorptive qualities, it cannot be transported using contemporary gasoline piping.

Fortunately, it has been found that isomers of butanol - in particular, n-butanol and isobutanol - do have similar physical properties to gasoline and can be transported. Many industrial companies have thus directed their efforts to mass-producing these butanol isomers via fermentation processes. However, these isomers are highly toxic to the biological organisms that produce them, and thus the butanol is evident in very low concentration (0.5-1%) in the fermentation broth. Purification and extraction of the butanol from this broth via the standard separation procedure of distillation has been shown to be highly costly, as the process requires more energy input than can be extracted. As such, alternative energy-efficient separation processes need to be developed to properly purify the butanol fuel. One promising process is pervaporation, where the liquid fermentation broth is brought into contact with a membrane and is preferentially transported. The resulting butanol-rich permeate is then removed as a vapor from the downstream end of the membrane. Continuous cycling and processing of the butanol through the pervaporation membrane would thus maintain the butanol concentration in the fermentor below toxic levels and allow for increased production.

The Register group in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering has successfully synthesized a series of block and random copolymers for the development of suitable pervaporation membranes in which domains of one block facilitate transport and separation of the permeate while the domains of the second block uphold the stability and mechanical integrity of the membrane. Thus, my thesis project would be to further characterize the pervaporation performance of these copolymers for various types of alcohol biofuels (n-butanol, isobutanol, ethanol, etc.) via quantification of variables such as transmembrane flux and separation factor and further analyze the relationship of these variables to each polymer's material properties.