KU News Release

KU researcher receives grant to further booming chemical research field

LAWRENCE — A University of Kansas professor has been awarded a $300,000 grant for research leading to environmentally harmless alternatives to solvents such as acetone, paint thinner and other gasoline products.

The funding from the National Science Foundation has been awarded to Aaron Scurto, assistant professor of chemical and petroleum engineering and researcher at KU’s Center for Environmentally Beneficial Catalysis.

Scurto says his research will be part of a booming new family of clean, green solvents called ionic liquids. They will be used industrially.

Scurto says he’s eager to help this technology “achieve all that it possibly can. It’s not going to do that unless we make them in environmentally benign ways and unless we figure out how to make them cheaply.”

Ionic “liquids” are organic salts that are liquid near room temperature. They are composed of ions, like table salt, and have no volatility to enter the environment, unlike current organic solvents.

“You smell them (organic solvents) at gas stations and with household products, like turpentine. You smell them because it is evaporating and those solvents are getting into your nose,” he said.

Scurto says his research could lead to alternatives for solvents deemed as volatile organic compounds by the Environmental Protection Agency. These include acetone, paint thinner and other gasoline products that evaporate into the environment. Other organic solvents are used everywhere from household cleaners to chemical manufacturing products.

“In the chemical industry, you get some evaporation or loss,” of organic solvents, Scurto said. “Companies spend millions of dollars to recover that evaporation. They wouldn’t have to with ionic liquids. They would have to worry more about not getting it into soil or water.”

Some companies are already working to find ionic liquids to replace solvents used in paper or pulp processing and to make better lithium batteries.

Currently, ionic liquids are costly even when made in small batches and frequently the processes in which they are made require using the very solvents they are intended to replace, thus defeating the purpose of being environmentally benign.

Scurto’s research will include the use of pressurized carbon dioxide as one of those alternative solvents for ionic liquid production. When carbon dioxide is pressurized to a certain point, it becomes dense like a liquid, which can function as an environmentally benign solvent.

“The beauty of this application is that ionic liquids are completely insoluble in compressed carbon dioxide,” he said. “Thus when they form during the reaction, they are naturally separated from the reactants.” The separations are often complicated and contribute the largest expense to any process.

Because they are a flexible, designable class of solvents, thousands of different ionic liquids are possible.

“That’s why people are interested: because you can build into the molecule some property that you want,” he said. For example, you could make an ionic liquid that can dissolve in water.

He adds the scientific world still has more to learn about ionic liquids. Science lacks an understanding of how much ionic liquid a given “recipe” would yield, how they would be separated later or how much they would react when put to use.

That broader understanding, when reached, will lead to decreasing human and environmental exposure to conventional volatile substances.

The project will also train students in the research and analysis skills needed to develop an environmentally friendly alternative and compare it to existing technology.

The entire process will lead to case studies to be used in two KU courses: Environmentally Benign Reaction Engineering and Environmental Assessment of Chemical Processing.

Scurto said he is excited to receive his first substantial grant. He has worked at KU for almost two years.

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