Materials

These have a distinct structural motif based on a C-glycoside bond that distinguishes them from existing commercial carbohydrate-based surfactants.  The Center for Green Chemistry & Green Engineering is currently looking for ways to optimize their production and explore their performance in the hopes of identifying applications that would benefit from their unique properties.

Non-food biomass is a significant, carbon-neutral energy source. Thus developing chemical approaches for its transformation either to liquid transportation fuels or to diverse useful chemicals would have significant economic and environmental benefits.  This is a challenging task due to the highly complex structure of biomass therefore many different directions will be explored during the course of this project.  Initially heterogenous catalytic systems will be studied and established. Based on these systems, we will gain insight to understanding key factors and structural features required for reactivity and selectivity that will lead to development of homogenous catalysts. These novel homogenous systems would then allow for milder reaction conditions and increased selectivity.

Support vectors machines are being utilized to reproduce the work that has been done on acute aquatic toxicity. Furthermore, wrapper algorithms for feature selection, using support vector machines with kernel functions are being used to extract the relevant molecular and physiochemical properties that are appropriate for given acute toxicity data.  Support vector classification techniques allow us to identify ranges and bounds for various chemical properties that can be used as guidelines to design safer chemicals. These methods will further be developed and applied to try to derive molecular guidelines that will reduce the acute toxicity of pesticides on birds.

While modular construction has advantages in terms of material and time efficiency, it requires a different infrastructure than conventional construction, and the overall environmental trade-offs between the two methods has been unclear.  Data were gathered from modular constructions companies, conventional builders and construction experts, for both residential and commercial projects.  The research assesses impacts from material production and transport, off-site and on-site energy use, worker transport, and waste management.  For both residential and commercial projects the impacts of the building were found to be moderately less for modulcar construction than for conventional construction for most impact catergories considered.

In addition to enhanced applicability, the addition of certain surface functional groups has been shown to result in a decreased cytotoxic response.   This offers the unique opportunity to utilize fSWNTs to both enhance the application of this unique class of nanomaterials while simultaneously reducing their negative human health and environmental implications.  

This fusion of the principles of green engineering with nanotechnology has been coined as “green nanotechnology” and will be applied in this proposed research to better understand the potential to “design out” the negative implications of SWNTs at all stages of the material and nanoproduct life cycle.   The overall goal of this study is to further elucidate the hazard and mechanisms of CNT toxicity, particularly single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs); strategies for decreasing the potential hazard, such as the addition of surface functionalizations; the impact of environmental conditions on the fate and transport of pristine and functionalized SWNTs (fSWNTs); and provide quantitative data supporting the use of green principles and practices in the safer design of next generation nano-enabled products.  

In pursuit of this goal, initial work will focus on utilizing multiple assays to test the bacterial cytotoxic response of a range of fSWNTs.  Particular fSWNTs and their favorable physicochemical properties will be identified to optimize design for reduced cytotoxicity. Then, a study will be completed to elucidate the effect of environmental conditions, including pH and salinity, on the eventual fate and transport of fSWNTs.   In addition to examining the benefit of incorporating green design principles at the raw material stage, a life cycle analysis (LCA) will be completed to quantify the potential environmental benefit of green manufacture and use of nano-enabled products to inform future product innovation, product manufacture, nano-policy and nano-regulation.