Phillip E. Savage

Research Interests

Sustainable Production of Energy and Chemical Products: Green Chemistry & Chemical Reaction Engineering

Our reliance on petroleum for chemical products and energy is not sustainable. Also, industrial chemical processes could be made both more profitable and more environmentally friendly if they produced less waste. Our research group investigates chemical reaction systems that are important for sustainable chemical synthesis and energy production. The research is aimed at reducing the environmental impact of these vital activities.

In one current set of projects, we are developing chemical syntheses in high-temperature liquid water. The motivation for this work is pollution prevention. Replacing organic solvents now used in commercial chemical processes with high-temperature liquid water would result in “greener” processes. We do exploratory work to discover different specialty and commodity chemicals that can be synthesized in this environmentally benign reaction medium. We also do fundamental kinetics studies and mechanistic work to build a better understanding of chemistry in this environmentally benign reaction medium. The projects involve experiments, mechanism-based reaction models, computational quantum chemistry, and molecular dynamics simulations.

A second set of projects deals with energy production and the use of renewable resources. We are developing strategies for converting renewable resources (e.g., biomass, agricultural wastes) into hydrogen, methane, and liquid fuels. These strategies involve chemical reactions, both catalyzed and uncatalyzed, in supercritical water and other supercritical fluids.

A third area deals with using water as a reaction medium for making semiconductor nanoparticles, or quantum dots. These materials have intriguing optical, electronic, and biological applications. Current synthetic routes involve the use of toxic, flammable, and expensive organic solvents. We are exploring approaches that use water as the reaction medium. We have demonstrated the feasibility of this approach with CdSe quantum dots, and we are now working on exploring the effects of the process variables in an attempt to improve the quantum yield of the particles.

Our goals in all of the projects are to resolve the reaction networks, determine the kinetics for the different steps in the network, and probe the reaction mechanism. Accomplishing these goals provides the reaction engineering information needed for process design and optimization and also provides fundamental, molecular-level details about the reaction chemistry.