Group News & Updates
Welcome our newest members: Curt Bougher, Thilina Gunasekara (TG), Yuan Jiang, and Michael Mazzotta are our four newest graduate students members of the group.
Mahdi has been elected Fellow of AAAS (the American Association for the Advancement of Science): For distinguished contributions to the field of mechanistic inorganic chemistry, with particular emphasis on atom transfer reactions of oxorhenium complexes. Congrats Mahdi! Purdue News Release>> AAAS Elected Fellows 2012>>
Cleavage and hydrodeoxygenation (HDO) of C-O bonds in lignin using Pd/Zn catalyst: Dr. Trenton Parsell (postdoc) et al report on a novel bimetallic Zn/Pd/C catalyst that can cleave lignin polymers and achieve selective HDO leaving the aromatic rings unscathed. This methodology opens a new avenue for biomass pretreatment and adding value to lignin. Our results just appeared as an edge article in Chemical Science. Read More>>
Solvent free methods for making acetals from furfural and glycerol: Graduate students Ben Wgenhart and Shuo Liu lead the effort in developing solid Lewis acid catalysts for the 'green' condensation of furfural and glycerol (biorenewables) under neat conditions. In collaboration with Thom and Stanley we investigated the uility of the products as components of biodiesel. Read about our results in ACS Catalysi . Read More>>
Deoxygenation of polyols to alkenes using MTO: Graduate students Jing Yi and Shuo Liu report on the use of methyltrioxorhenium (MTO) for the direct deoxygenation of polyols to olefins under neat conditions or in the presence of a sacrificial alcohol as a reductant. Our exciting discovery and its implication for biomass and glycerol conversion appeared in ChemSusChem . Read More>>
Major advance in analysis of lignin complex mixture: In collaboration with Professors Kenttämaa and Bozell's laboratories, a new tandem MS method was developed for the analysis of complex lignin mixtures. Read our article in Analytical Chemistry . Read More>>
Kinetic modeling of polymerization: a comprehensive study of a salan zirconium catalyst revealed details of chain transfer and olefin misinsertion. Learn more about the power of using the molecular weight distribution (MWD) for obtaining kinetic data. Our article was published in Macromolecules. Read More>>
Direct conversion of lignocellulose into fuels and chemicals: our study with Dr. Saha (University of Delhi) using simple metal chlorides was the most downloaded J. Cat. paper. Read More>>
Oxorhenium carborane synthesized: Our postdoc Ram synthesized and fully characterized trioxorhena(VII)carborane and its methyl-substituted analogue. These compounds are related to CpRe(O)3 and MTO. The carborane binds with a hapticity of one. See our paper in Organometallics. Read More>>
Aluminum converts biomass carbohydrates to furfurals: Visiting graduate student Yu Yang (from Key Laboratory, Sichuan University) and in collaboration with Prof. Hu developed an efficient biphasic system for extracting C5 and C6 sugars from various biomass feedstock (poplar, grass, etc.). The process uses aluminum hexa-aqua and water/THF solvent. This study appeared in Green Chemistry. Read More>>
Selective conversion of hemicellulose from biomass using maleic acid with microwave heating : Graduate students Eurick Kim and Shuo Liu in collaboration with Prof. Mosier in Ag and Biological Engineering (ABE) studied the selectivity and kinetics of making furfural from xylans using various biomass feedstock. This manuscript appeared in the ACS journal Energy & Fuels. Read More>>
A perspective article on our corrole and porphyrin work is published in Dalton Transactions: Read More>>
|
About Us | Links | Purdue Chemistry
