Pitt professor awarded Fulbright for chemical bond “surgery”

Every year, chemical manufacturing releases about 100 million tons of waste into the… Every year, chemical manufacturing releases about 100 million tons of waste into the environment, according to researchers at Northwestern University.

With the help of a Fulbright Scholarship, however, Pitt’s Julie d’Itri, associate professor of chemical and petroleum engineering, plans to learn how to turn those wasteful chemicals back into something commercially useful.

D’Itri will be traveling to the Schuit Institute of Catalysis at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands this fall on a J. William Fulbright Award for Lecturing and Teaching. Her research and lectures at Eindhoven will focus on environmentally benign chemical processing, which involves altering the factors in chemical reactions in order to convert wasteful byproducts into valuable chemicals.

“The name of the game is that if you make a chemical that you’re going to sell, you produce no extra byproducts or waste,” she said.

She will be examining how to remove wasteful byproducts from reactions between 1,2-dichloroethane and hydrogen, in which a sample of a platinum-copper alloy acts as a catalyst. A catalyst essentially provokes the start of a chemical reaction.

Pitt graduate students Dmitry Kazachkin and Eid Al-Mutairi, members of d’Itri’s research team, have experimented with chemical reactions between hydrogen and 1,2-dichloroethane, a chlorocarbon, using a catalyst with 100 percent platinum surface. Their studies show that these chemical reactions produce only ethane, which has limited commercial applications.

When they used a platinum copper alloy as a catalyst instead, the reactions between the new alloy and hydrogen produced mostly ethylene, which can be used as a refrigerant, a raw material for anesthetics, and can even be used to help ripen fruit.

The technology available to d’Itri at the Schuit Institute at Eindhoven will allow her to monitor atomic force changes, energy loss and surface changes in the platinum-copper alloy, as well as changes in the reaction itself, on the microscopic level. She will be able to determine the relationship between the structure of the platinum-copper alloy and what kind and how many byproducts the reactions will produce. Then she will be able to manipulate the structure of the metal to produce useful chemicals instead of waste.

“It’s sort of like doing surgery because you get all of these bonds, and you want to be able to cut just the bonds you want to cut,” she said.

In addition to her research, d’Itri will be teaching a course at the Schuit Institute on environmentally benign chemical processing, where her students will learn how to use kinetics and thermodynamics to eliminate waste from chemical production.

Much of d’Itri’s research builds on her previous work at other universities, including Pitt, as well as at other companies. She was previously an employee in industry at Corning Glassware, where she worked on the catalytic converters in automobiles, which convert car wastes into water, nitrogen and carbon dioxide. Her interest in the effects of catalysis on chemicals directed her back to graduate school at Northwestern.

In addition to her chlorocarbon research, d’Itri’s work at Pitt also includes studying how to improve the way automobile catalytic converters react to the sulfur from cars. She is also working on developing “fuels of the future,” particularly on forming fuel cells from hydrogen, which would only produce water as a byproduct and may be able to supply more lasting energy to a car than gasoline. She also serves as a program manager for the U.S. Department of Energy, helping to allocate federal funds for energy research.

The Fulbright Scholarships, which are sponsored by the U.S. Department of State Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs and administered by the Council for the International Exchange of Scholars, are presented to about 800 U.S. and international scholars each year. The scholars, who lecture and do research in a variety of science and humanities fields around the world, are chosen for their leadership in their respective fields and for their ability to act as a diplomatic and cultural representative for their home country.

Though the Council for the International Exchange of Scholars thought she would make a suitable representative for the U.S., d’Itri herself was amazed that she would get to go study in the Netherlands.

“I didn’t think I was going to get one,” she said with a laugh. “I thought they were going to give them all to oil painters to go visit Rembrandt’s house.”