Year: 2018

The College of Engineering, Computing, and Applied Sciences honored four staff members at their annual celebration. Awards went to outstanding classified employees for performance, achievements, or accomplishments that are exemplary and that contribute to the success of the college. ChBE’s Terri McAllister was one of two recipients in the College to receive the Dean’s Exceptional Staff Award.

Congratulations Terri!

Read more about the annual holiday celebration and award here: http://newsstand.clemson.edu/four-staff-members-honored-in-holiday-party/

The Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering welcomes Dr. Michael J. Nash, a Plantserv™ & Product Management Manager at Linde Engineering North America in Canton, Georgia. He is an experienced project manager, research scientist, and sales engineer in chemistry and chemical engineering specializing in Heterogeneous catalysis processes.

His seminar titled, “Catalysts for a Reaction & a Career,” will take place on Thursday, December 6 from 2:00-3:00pm in Earle 100.

There are more than a thousand different types of catalysts that occur in nature or are artificially created by humans. Typical examples of biological catalysts are enzymes, which the human body uses to function, while traditional homogeneous & heterogeneous catalysts are used in industry to create many of the products we use every day. This talk will focus on the author’s experience in the heterogeneous catalyst field in three separate industries, 1) Specialty Chemicals, 2) Environmental Control Technologies, and 3) Industrial Catalysts. For each of these industries the author will present his experiences developing new catalyst technologies, such as the development of new Selective Catalytic Reduction (SCR) catalysts for higher NOx reduction on power plants and vehicles. He will then contrast how industrial catalyst research in each of these industries differs not only by their industry but also by the properties of the reaction. For example, in applications where the reaction is kinetically controlled such as SCR catalysts on cars, catalyst manufacturers invest heavily in understanding the catalysts at a fundamental level. However, in industrial catalysts such as Steam Methane Reformer catalysts, which are used in thermodynamically controlled reactions, catalyst manufacturers invest more in modifying the physical properties of the catalyst to make them cheaper or provide a benefit. In additional to presenting the catalyst technologies being developed in each of these industries the author will also touch on the dynamics of commercialization of these catalysts. The commercialization dynamics will vary drastically depending on the impact the catalysts may have on the cost of operations and the risk the customer is taking. Finally, throughout the entire talk the author will emphasis the inadvertent impacts researching these catalysts has had on his career, particularly in terms of interacting with customers, patenting of catalysts, and career progression.

Dr. Nash earned his B.S. from University of Florida in Chemistry & Chemical Engineering in 2003 and his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering in 2008. Dr. Nash’s dissertation was “An investigation into the Photocatalytic properties of microporous titanosilicate materials”. He has also served in the Army National Guard following by working as an Advanced Research Chemical Engineer with Eastman Chemical. Then, Dr. Nash joined Johnson Matthey as a Principal Scientist and later promoted to Senior Application Engineer. He currently works with Linde Engineering North America as Plantserv™ & Product Management Manger.

For the American Institute of Chemical Engineer’s 110 year celebration, they launched a blog series titled, “Revisiting the Future of Chemical Engineering” to commemorate how much the field has changed and how much it will continue to evolve. The series features 29 blogs written by leaders in academia, industry, and government (national laboratories). Each post consists of an interview-style article where the professional describes how they believe chemical engineering will change in the next 25 years.

ChBE’s Dr. Marc Birtwistle is featured in the series. Dr. Birtwistle was previously featured by AIChE in 2008 in a similar campaign for their 100 year celebration. The article compares his 2008 comments to his current thoughts about the future of chemical engineering.

Read Dr. Birtwistle’s article here: https://www.aiche.org/chenected/2018/10/marc-birtwistle-clemson-university-future-chemical-engineering.

The Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering welcomes Dr. Christopher E. Wilmer, an assistant professor in the Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh where he directs the Hypothetical Materials Lab. The lab’s research focuses on advanced uses of porous crystals, such as in developing artificial noses or storing oxygen.

His seminar titled, “Understanding Thermal Transport in Porous Crystals” will take place on Thursday, November 29 from 2:00-3:00pm in Earle 100.

Highly porous materials are very useful for chemical separations, catalysis, and gas storage. The last twenty years has been particularly exciting in this area because of the discovery of highly porous crystals called metal-organic frameworks (MOFs). By changing the building blocks used in their self-assembly, their pore structures can be tuned to target specific applications, and in two decades, over 70,000 different MOFs have been reported in the literature.

However, an important property for the practical implementation of MOFs as industrial adsorbents has received relatively little attention over that time: thermal transport. Whenever gases are rapidly loaded and unloaded in porous materials, there is a sharp increase and decrease of temperature. In just the last few years, understanding of thermal transport in porous crystals, and MOFs in particular, has increased significantly. Through molecular simulations, we have investigated the thermal conductivity of MOFs both as a function of their pore structure and also as function of gas loading [1-2]. An important observation of the Hypothetical Materials Lab, which is contested and for which experimental support is scarce, is that thermal conductivity of MOFs generally decreases in the presence of adsorbed gases [3]. This observation, if found to be hold as a general phenomenon, implies greater challenges for MOFs as gas adsorbents: not only are they typically insulating materials to begin with, but their insulating nature is exacerbated by the presence of gases. In this talk, Dr. Wilmer presents his collected evidence on this important phenomenon and outline potential strategies to control and mitigate unwanted thermal effects in gas adsorption scenarios.

Dr. Wilmer received his B.A.Sc. degree from the University of Toronto’s Engineering Science’s Nanoengineering program. While pursuing a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering at Northwestern under the mentorship of Prof. Randall Q. Snurr, he took an interest in the American way of developing new technologies—through entrepreneurship. While still a student, he co-founded, NuMat Technologies, which develops commercial gas storage solutions using MOFs, for which he was named to the Forbes Top 30-Under-30 list in Energy Innovation. The Hypothetical Materials Lab he directs at the University of Pittsburgh recently spun-out Aeronics, which manufactures inexpensive oxygen storage containers for people with decreased lung function.

ChBE senior Deidra Ward was recently featured in the November 5th edition of Chemical and Engineering News Magazine (C&EN). The article titled, “Diversity in Focus at NOBCChE,” highlighted her experience at the National Organization for the Professional Advancement of Black Chemists & Chemical Engineers (NOBCChE) annual conference. Deidra is the president of Clemson University’s NOBCChE student chapter, which was founded earlier this year. She attended the conference in September with other Clemson NOBCChE chapter executive officers.

The article discusses Deidra’s career aspirations and features her poster on polymer formulations for bioadhesives that she presented at the conference.

Read more about Deidra and NOBCChE here: https://cen.acs.org/careers/diversity/NOBCChE-meeting-students-professionals-forge/96/i44.

The American Institute of Engineers (AIChE) presented Sallye Gathmann with the 2017-2018 Donald F. & Mildred Topp Othmer Scholarship Award at their annual conference in Pittsburgh, PA during the Student Awards Ceremony on Sunday, October 28. Sallye was nominated by the Clemson University AIChE Student Chapter to receive this honor. The scholarship of $1,000 is a competitive award only given to 15 AIChE Student Members from around the country annually based on academic achievement and student chapter involvement.

Sallye was also recognized at the conference for winning second place for the Separations category in the 2018 Undergraduate Student Poster Competition. Her poster was titled, “Ultrapure Lignin via Liquid-Lignin Lignin-Solvent Systems: Phase Behavior & Characterization.” She is advised by Dr. Mark Thies.

The Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering would like to congratulate Sallye on her achievements!

Graduate students from the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering won first place in both categories at Clemson University’s Three Minute Thesis (3MT) competition on Nov. 2.

Joshua Osuofa won the graduate student category for his presentation, “Filters for faster production of Biologics,” and James Foster won the PhD candidate category for his presentation, “Innovative Materials for the Screening of Plutonium in Water Sources.” Dr. Scott Husson advises both students.

James will go on to represent Clemson at the February 2019 Conference of Southern Graduate Schools (CSGS) 3MT competition in Knoxville, TN.

3MT is a research communication competition that gives higher degree students just three minutes to present their work and its significance without using jargon to a non-specialist audience. This year, more than 50 students representing all colleges at the university participated in the competition.

The Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering welcomes Dr. William E. Mustain, a professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of South Carolina, as a part of the ChBE 2018 Fall Seminar series. Over the past fourteen years, Dr. Mustain has worked in several areas related to electrochemical energy generation and storage including: high capacity materials for Li-ion batteries, catalysts and supports for proton exchange membrane and anion exchange membrane fuel cells and electrolyzers, electrochemical synthesis of fuels, electrochemical control of biological systems, improving the stability and reversibility of materials in alkaline electrochemical cells, the purposeful use of carbonates in low temperature electrochemical systems, and the electrochemical capture and utilization of CO2.

His seminar titled, “Do Fancy Materials Mean that Batteries and Fuel Cells Automatically Work Better? Two Short Stories in Materials and Electrode Engineering,” will take place on Thursday, October 18 from 2:00-3:00pm in Earle 100.

In recent years, the desire to design, create and/or discover advanced functional nanomaterials has changed the way that faculty members and graduate students approach engineering research.  Though there are many research areas where these materials can (and likely will) make a significant impact, the truth is that in most disciplines, materials with highly complex structures remain on the fringes of the technology.  In some cases, these nanostructured materials require highly complex, costly synthesis procedures that do not scale well. There are also countless examples in the literature where the material of interest performs very well using model systems, but there are significant difficulties in transitioning the material to the real reacting environment.  This is not to say that structure, or more specifically nanostructured materials, should not be investigated – in fact, far from it! What it does mean is that we must be careful to understand that structure is one variable and often times there are other fundamental (surface composition, electronic mobility, thermodynamic barriers, etc) and engineering (porosity, mass transport, etc.) properties that drive behavior in complex environments.

In his talk, Dr. Mustain will present two vignettes.  The first report will detail the adoption of transition metal oxides as the active material at the lithium ion battery anode.  Discussion will center around i) initial efforts in materials design that were ultimately unfruitful (both in the Mustain lab and the literature) and the search for variables that controlled high capacity and capacity retention, ii) difficulties in transitioning metal oxides from half cell to full cell formats, and iii) the renewed importance of material design and geometry in the work – and the new challenges with scaling existing approaches. The second story will discuss the road to achieving high performance anion exchange membrane fuel cells. In this work, the group was able to show that without any new materials, it was possible to both improve the performance of these cells by 10x (defining a new state-of-the-art in the process) as well as enable 100’s of hours of stable operation.

William (Bill) Mustain is a Full Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of South Carolina.  In 2017, Dr. Mustain moved to USC from the Department of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Connecticut where he was an Associate Professor and the United Technologies Corporation Professor of Engineering Innovation.  He joined UConn as an Assistant Professor in 2008, and was tenured and promoted to Associate Professor in 2013.

Dr. Mustain has been the PI or Co-PI on approximately $7.5M of externally funded research projects.  He has published over 80 peer reviewed articles to date and has over 100 invited and conference talks. He also has authored three book chapters and three pending US patents.  He has been the recipient of several awards including the U.S. Department of Energy Early Career Award (2013), Connecticut Quality Improvement Platinum Award (2014), Supramaniam Srinivasan Young Investigator Award (Awarded by the Energy Technology Division of the Electrochemical Society, 2014), Illinois Institute of Technology Young Alumnus Award (2009), UConn Chemical Engineering Faculty of the Year Award (2017) and Fulbright Scholar Fellowship (2015-2016).

For more information about Dr. Mustain’s project from the seminar and his research group, please visit https://www.mustainlab.com. 

The Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering welcomes Dr. Jeremy Palmer, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Houston, as a part of the ChBE 2018 Fall Seminar series. Dr. Palmer is a computational scientist studying supercooled liquids and glasses, crystallization phenomena, and adsorption and transport in complex media.

His seminar, titled, “Particle transport in soft, disordered media,” will take place on Thursday, October 11 from 2:00-3:00pm in Earle 100.

Understanding particle transport through soft, disordered media is relevant to applications ranging from medical imaging and drug delivery to enhanced oil recovery and polymer nanocomposite processing. When particle size is much larger or much smaller than typical length scales within the confining medium, transport processes are well described by continuum theories. The continuum assumption breaks down, however, when particles and features of the medium are comparable in size.  In this limit, particle transport remains incompletely understood. In his talk, Dr. Palmer will discuss our recent application of molecular simulation to investigate particle transport through two types of complex soft materials. First, he will demonstrate that advanced simulation techniques can be used to elucidate the physical mechanisms responsible for the anomalous transport behavior that has been recently reported in microscopy experiments on nanoparticles suspended in semidilute polymer solutions. Second, he will show how dynamical trajectories of embedded tracer particles can be analyzed to gain insight into the morphology of the slow and collective structural rearrangements that facilitate relaxation in supercooled liquids and glasses. In both systems, unusual dynamics arise due to the coupling of particle motions with comparably sized fluctuations in the surrounding medium.

Dr. Palmer received his B.S. in biomedical engineering from Johns Hopkins University (2006) and PhD (2011) in chemical engineering from North Carolina State University, and he worked as a postdoc in chemical engineering at Princeton University from 2011—2014. In 2014, he joined UH as an Assistant Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. He is the recipient of the Regional Blavatnik Award for Young Scientists (in Chemistry, 2014) and the NSF CAREER Award (2018).

The Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering welcomes Dr. Jeffrey Twiss as a part of the ChBE 2018 Fall Seminar series. Dr. Twiss is the SmartState Endowed Chair in Childhood Neurotherapeutics and a Professor at the University of South Carolina where he is the Chair of Biological Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences. Dr. Twiss was in the Medical Scientist Training program at the Medical University of South Carolina where he received his M.D. and Ph.D.  He subsequently did clinical training in Neuropathology and post-doctoral fellowship in Neurobiology at Stanford University. He was recruited back to South Carolina in 2013 from Drexel University.  His lab is a leader in the field of axonal RNA transport and translation.

His seminar, titled “Leveraging Molecular Knowledge of Growth Mechanisms for Neural Repair Strategies,” will take place on Thursday, October 20, 2018 from 2:00-3:00pm in Earle 100.

Neurons have axons that extend more than a meter in humans, and are used to connect neurons to each other and to target tissues like muscle.  These axons are needed for long-range communication in the nervous system. For spinal cord injury and peripheral nerve injury, movement and sensations are lost when axons are severed and there is a pressing need to develop therapies to facilitate axon regeneration.  The Twiss lab’s work focuses on molecular mechanisms of axon growth, and particularly how localized protein synthesis contributes to axon growth. Neurons regulate mRNA transport into and translation within axons through RNA-protein interactions. In studies focused on these RNA-protein interactions, Dr. Twiss will present recently uncovered mechanisms of mRNA storage in axons that are being targeted as a strategy to accelerate axon regeneration.