The Gene and Linda Voiland School of Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering is hosting a seminar presented by Greg Collinge, Ph.D. Student, Voiland School of Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering, Washington State University, Jan. 22, at 4:10 p.m. in ADBF 1002/FLOYD 256 (Tri-Cities).
Greg Collinge is from Spokane, Washington and earned his B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Washington State University (WSU) in 2014. Accepting an Achievement Rewards for College Scientists scholarship to attend, Mr. Collinge started his Ph.D. work with Professor Jean-Sabin McEwen at WSU the same year. In 2016, he earned a National Science Foundation (NSF) East Asia and Pacific Summer Institutes Fellowship to conduct a two-month research project with Professor Catherine Stampfl in Australia at the University of Sydney. That same year, Mr. Collinge was awarded a fellowship through the NSF Graduate Student Fellowship Program, providing three years of direct funding for the remainder of his Ph.D. tenure. Since starting his Ph.D. research, Mr. Collinge has given three oral presentations at the annual meeting of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers and received a travel award from the Catalysis and Reaction Engineering division in 2017. That same year, he received a prestigious Kokes Award from the North American Catalysis Society to give an Oral Presentation at its biennial conference in Denver, Colorado. At present, Mr. Collinge has published four peer-reviewed papers, two of which as first author., and two more first author publications are in preparation
Determining the Fischer-Tropsch Reaction Environment on Co and CoCu Catalysts
The reaction mechanism of the Fischer-Tropsch (FT) process is a continual source of intrigue and debate. While two classes of mechanisms have been proposed (namely, carbide vs. CO-insertion), the composition and configuration of the catalytically active phase has received a comparatively small amount of attention. On mixed-metal CoCu FT catalysts this problem is especially prominent due to the confounding presence of an additional metal species. X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy measurements on CoCu show an increase in surface Co after exposure to carbon monoxide (CO). In terms of chemical species in the catalytically active phase, chemical transient kinetic experiments on model pure Co FT catalysts have yielded evidence for a “crowded” reactive surface as well, where oxygen, hydrogen, and carbon bind to the surface of the catalyst in quantities exceeding the monolayer limit. As such, the interactions between the reactants and metals as well as the role they play during catalysis must be elucidated, and for this, we must have a reliable model of the catalytically active phase under experimentally relevant conditions. To this end, we present a DFT-based investigation of the metal-metal, metal-adsorbate, and adsorbate-adsorbate interactions on Co and CoCu, anticipating that such information will provide guidance for more complete mechanistic studies addressing chain lengthening initiation and growth.