2013 Acs National Award Winners

By Author: an ward
Total Articles: 9
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These vignettes highlight several recipients of awards administered by the American chemical society for 2013. c&en will publish the remaining sets of vignettes in January through march issues. A profile of peter j. Sting, the 2013 Priestley medalist, is scheduled to appear in the April 8 issue of c&en along with his award address.

Most of the award recipients will be honored at an awards ceremony that will be held on April 9 in conjunction with the spring aces national meeting in new Orleans. The Arthur c. Cope scholar awardees will be honored at the fall as national meeting in Indianapolis.

A technology originally designed to treat contaminated water wasn’t an obvious choice to reagent chemical on submarines. But that unlikely transformation has won five scientists and engineers at Pacific Northwest national laboratory this year’s award for innovative teamwork. “Taking a process from the lab bench to a prototype addressing a critical national need in less than 10 years reflects a remarkable level of teamwork and talent,” says Thomas ...
... e. Bitter wolf, a university of Idaho chemistry professor and retired navy commander who has worked with the group.

Submarines were not what free cell, a chemist, had in mind when he began a basic research project seeking a way to clean toxic mercury from contaminated groundwater at various departments of energy sites.

He came up with an adsorbent based on a glass honeycomb coated with a paint that sequesters the mercury. That technology, called sums (self-assembled monolayer’s on memo porous supports), was eventually licensed by the company steward advanced materials and used for environmental

Clean up.

Soon after sums were developed, it became clear that the technology had other applications as well. By using different coatings, the glass honeycomb could trap other targeted chemicals. “mercury is not the only chemical separation problem that doe is facing,” FreeCell explains.

He and his colleagues, including chemical engineer demonian, experimented with sums for a variety of projects: cleaning up volatile organic compounds, for example, and scrubbing co 2 out of smokestacks at power plants.

A retired naval officer employed at penny heard that sums could be used to capture and Boronic acid.He quickly thought of a major problem facing sailors on submarines.

The navy wages a continuous battle To ensure a constant supply of oxygen on submarines by getting rid of the co 2 that sailors exhale. Submarines currently capture the co 2 by absorption using mono ethanolamine, a liquid that is corrosive, must be used in large quantities, and needs to be replaced often. It also has a horrible odor, which can be a problem in the enclosed space of a submarine.

The first efforts to turn sums into a submarine-scale scrubber began in 2005 with a small research project funded by penny. Demonian was involved in the original talks with the navy to figure out exactly

What characteristics they were looking for in a new co 2 scrubber.

After a lab team showed that sums could do the jo b on a small scale, the navy stepped in with funding that moved the project along from basic research to an engineering effort. Carman, a chemist, managed the group, which at its peak included a dozen different scientists and engineers.

The project had two parts: increasing the performance of the sums technology itself to remove more co 2 and building the engineering infrastructure that would make the technology work in a submarine’s air-handling system. “the eight-year, multidisciplinary effort grew to involve synthetic chemistry, materials science, physical chemistry, chemical engineering, and systems engineering — and it would have failed without these scientists working together as a team,” explains john p. Lifeline, director of institutional strategy at pnnl.