SBIR Phase I: Light-Driven Conversion of CO2 and Methane to Syngas

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research project is that the proposed chemical reactor utilizes methane from natural gas, a native resource, and waste carbon dioxide from industrial processes to create syngas, a widely used industrial gas. Syngas is a crucial resource for production of hydrogen, ammonia, methanol, and synthetic fuels. Hydrogen can be used as a clean alternative fuel to gasoline, ammonia is used in the production of fertilizer for food, and methanol can be used to produce olefins that are used to produce plastics. This chemical reactor uses LED light as an energy source instead of heat from burning fuel to consume two potent greenhouse gases and create a commercially relevant product at a competitive price. Using LED light allows for the use of renewable electricity, whenever available, to power the chemical reaction, in effect electrifying the chemical manufacturing process and reducing its carbon emissions. Some commercial benefits of this reactor are: (a) it is low-cost: built out of cost-effective materials such as glass, (b) it can startup and shut down on demand, (c) it can be made into large plants or efficiently scaled-down to build small-scale distributed reactor to produce syngas at the point-of-application. This SBIR Phase I project proposes to build and demonstrate a bench-scale photoreactor for dry methane reforming (DMR) reaction that uses LED light as its primary energy source. To date, DMR has not achieved commercialization due to very high temperature requirements and lack of commercially relevant stable catalyst. The presented photocatalyst overcomes the previous challenges with DMR. At lab-scale, it has has shown unprecedented high reaction rate, selectivity, and stability after long duration testing. This 6-month project will focus on three foundational aspects critical to this technology development: (a) develop a multi-physics thermal model of the bench-scale reactor in COMSOL to understand the energetic effects of the incident light and the endothermicity of the reaction on the catalyst bed, (b) build a bench-scale reactor and perform photocatalysis experiments to measure and optimize reaction rates and energy efficiency, (c) build a techno-economic model that can be used to determine the feasibility of this reactor for commercialization. Upon successful completion of the project, the reactor will be ready for a larger scale pilot implementation at a testing facility. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.