Department of Chemistry Seminar -Dr. Matthew Hurlock
About the event
Speaker: Dr. Matthew Hurlock, PNNL
Host: Dr. Jack Zhang
Title: Engineering Sorbents for Off-Gas Management at Scale: Bridging the Benchtop–Industry Divide
Abstract
Production of volatile fission products by nuclear fuel reprocessing and advanced reactors processes require capture to mitigate harmful impacts to public health and the environment. Nanoporous materials like metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) and zeolites offer material solutions for the selective capture of these harmful gases. A major challenge application of these materials at scale is engineering them into useable sorbent forms, such as composite beads or membranes. The Materials & System Design team, as part of the Nuclear Materials group, at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) seeks to develop and demonstrate engineered forms of emerging sorbents to bridge the gap between bench-top material discovery and large-scale applications. This ongoing research involves elucidation of fundamental structure–property relationships and applied large-scale testing under simulated process conditions. To achieve this a variety of chemical synthesis and testing apparatus capabilities have been developed. Bulk powder MOF and zeolites sorbents are made at the hundreds of gram scales using large scale solvothermal reactors and then formed into engineered sorbents through pressing or phase inversion approaches. Critically necessary are scalable synthesis of bulk sorbents and their engineered forms, and research focus is on identifying low-cost engineered sorbent materials made using low volume waste producing and continuous flow processes. Traditional benchtop gas-adsorption analyzers along with custom-built packed bed columns and membrane breakthrough systems are used to characterize and evaluate material performance at varying scales. Additionally, long-term stability under radiation environments is necessary for gas capture in nuclear processes. Therefore, new analysis methodologies have been developed, which can identify radiation damage and predict its impact on the gas adsorption performance. Modeling and techno-economic analysis of processes utilizing these materials are under development to understand the costs of these materials. Altogether this work enables improved design of next-generation sorbent materials that will be leveraged to demonstrate noble gas separation and capture at scale.
Bio
Dr. Hurlock is a chemist and material scientist in the Materials and System Design team, a part of the Nuclear Materials group at PNNL. Prior to starting at PNNL in 2024, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Sandia National Laboratories and graduated with a Ph.D. in chemistry from Washington State University. An expert in porous materials, Dr. Hurlock’s work focuses on the development and demonstration of scalable separations using processed sorbent materials. His work seeks to elucidate structural–property relationships of sorbents under process conditions to gain material design insights for new and emerging separations. Out of the lab, Dr. Hurlock is co-chair of the Young Chemist Committee for the Richland local chapter of the American Chemical Society.