Much of the world’s GDP depends on chemical catalysts, which are important for everything from the production of fuels and fertilizers to synthesizing pharmaceuticals. And an industry-university research center led by the University of South Carolina is helping researchers and industry partners better understand how those chemical reaction boosters can be tweaked for peak efficiency.
“You could say that catalysis underpins our entire world economy and our standard of living,” says J.R. Regalbuto, a chemical engineering professor who directs USC’s Center for Rational Catalyst Synthesis, the nation’s only National Science Foundation-sponsored industry-university cooperative research center focused on catalyst synthesis.
“The average person on the street couldn’t tell you what a catalyst is or does, but the food they’re eating was grown using fertilizer produced in a catalyst, the car they’re driving uses gasoline refined with catalysts, the clothes they’re wearing come from a catalytic process and their medicines were produced in catalytic reactors.”
Regalbuto launched the center nearly 10 years ago with chemical engineering faculty at USC and Virginia Commonwealth University and several industrial partners, whose membership fees help sponsor catalysis research projects. Today, the center includes 13 industrial members and scientists from the University of California-Berkeley, University of California-Davis and Washington State University.
“Catalyst preparation historically has been considered a black art, almost like you have to use the right incantations and spells to come up with effective catalysts,” Regalbuto says. “As a center, our motto is to turn the art of catalyst preparation into a science, and so we’re focused on studying the chemical fundamentals of heterogenous catalyst preparation — basically, figuring out how we can get atoms to go where we need them to go.”
“I think we’re kind of the poster child for NSF’s cooperative research centers in terms of inter-site collaboration."
Developing a deeper understanding of the fundamental science of catalyst synthesis lays the groundwork for improving catalyst efficiency, Regalbuto says. And because catalysts are used in large-scale chemical processing operations such as petroleum refining and fertilizer production, even incremental improvements in efficiency can have a major impact.
Some of the center’s research projects are applied, but many address fundamental scientific questions about catalysts. One such project resulted in an article in the preeminent journal Science in 2017.
“We demonstrated a relatively simple and very versatile method to make alloyed bi-metal catalysts with very small particle size on a common support material called silica,” Regalbuto says. “Not only did we synthesize really small nanoparticles, which is desired when the catalyst uses expensive metals like platinum or palladium, but we also showed that each nanoparticle was homogenously alloyed — each contained the same amount of metal.”
A recent evaluation determined that the center had saved its industrial members about $2.5 million on basic catalysis research that the industries would otherwise have had to perform themselves.
“This is what the NSF had in mind when they came up with the idea of funding industry-university research centers,” Regalbuto says.
The center has opened a pipeline of opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students involved in the industrial research projects. USC chemical engineering professor Chris Williams procured ancillary funding that sponsored USC undergrads and students from Midlands Technical College for research opportunities this past summer, and some of the students have continued to engage this semester. In addition, graduate students from USC and other academic members have landed jobs with many of the center’s industrial partners.
Regalbuto is applying for a third five-year phase for the center this year, which would extend its funding through 2030. He noted that the center has a good track record of research productivity and collaboration.
“I think we’re kind of the poster child for NSF’s cooperative research centers in terms of inter-site collaboration,” he says. “You want multiple sets of expertise brought to bear on a research problem, and the kinds of things we’re tackling are hard problems.”