Data-Centric Chemical Reaction Engineering for Energy Transition

The field of catalysis and reaction engineering has seen unprecedented growth in recent years, driven in part by the community’s genuine interest to help mitigate carbon emissions and transition to renewable energy sources. The technical portion of this talk will focus on data-centric chemical reaction engineering. Autonomous laboratory-scale flow reactors can high-throughput screen and generate sufficient experimental data to decipher reaction kinetics and mechanisms. Integration of in-situ spectroscopic methods with microfluidics and their automation creates the possibility of computers working synchronously with a handful of key experiments. Thus, the design of artificial intelligence methods with continuous-flow microreactors for faster discovery has become a central theme in most of my laboratory’s research. Rethinking how we perform laboratory experiments can reduce the chemical waste, energy requirements, make experiments safer, and it can yield molecular-scale information needed for predictive models for industrial applications. The presentation will conclude with remarks on how the division’s community and its programming activities have helped to reshape the field for a sustainable future.