Chemical Engineering

The National Academy of Engineering has elected Benny Freeman, a professor in the McKetta Department of Chemical Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, to the academy for 2023. Alumnus Fariborz Maseeh, who received a master’s degree in civil engineering from UT Austin, has also been elected.

The University of Texas at Austin will be home to a new multidisciplinary research and education initiative based in its Cockrell School of Engineering – the Energy Emissions Modeling and Data Lab (EEMDL) – that will address the growing need for accurate, timely, and clear accounting of greenhouse gas emissions across global oil and natural gas supply chains. Data and analysis from this new endeavor will help both public and private institutions develop climate strategies and actions informed by accurate, verified data, identifying opportunities for emissions reductions.

The University of Texas at Austin has a rich history in 3D printing, inventing one of the first forms of the technology, and now Texas Engineers have received a grant to tackle some of its most glaring problems.

In 3D printing, there is a tradeoff between the precision needed to create the object (resolution) and the speed and scale at which the object can be made (throughput). This is especially true at the nanoscale, where it is practically infeasible to make any kind of complex structure with multiple types of materials or patterns at a high rate.

Nearly two years after COVID-19 vaccines entered widespread use, featuring technology from researchers at The University of Texas at Austin, the Cockrell School of Engineering and the College of Natural Sciences have launched Texas Biologics, a cross-disciplinary effort made up of world-renowned faculty members and researchers working across all areas of therapeutics.

Nicholas Peppas has been honored with the Biomaterials Global Impact Award for 2022, which he received during the 32nd Annual Conference of the European Society of Biomaterials in Bordeaux, France. The award recognizes established researchers in the field of biomaterials who have accomplished great achievement.

The Center for Materials for Water and Energy Systems (M-WET) has been studying novel membrane-based approaches — and new materials — to change how we purify water for four years, and that work will continue after the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) renewed funding for the initiative. M-WET will receive an additional $12 million over another four years, through DOE’s Energy Frontier Research Center Program.

A new grant for researchers across several departments and schools at The University of Texas at Austin aims to establish a new hub of activity to better understand and replicate the skills that cells possess. The grant from the National Science Foundation will support a platform for creating synthetic cells with an emphasis on how they link up and exchange material and information with one another.

Mimicking the human body, specifically the actuators that control muscle movement, is of immense interest around the globe. In recent years, it has led to many innovations to improve robotics, prosthetic limbs and more, but creating these actuators typically involves complex processes, with expensive and hard-to-find materials. Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin and Penn State University have created a new type of fiber that can perform like a muscle actuator, in many ways better than other options that exist today. And, most importantly, these muscle-like fibers are simple to make and recycle.

A new, two-part class through Texas Engineering Executive Education (TxEEE), the professional development division of the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, aims to give the energy industry greater understanding of how to utilize, manage and understand one of the world’s most important fuels while reducing the release of a potent greenhouse gas.

An enzyme variant created by engineers and scientists at The University of Texas at Austin can break down environment-throttling plastics that typically take centuries to degrade in just a matter of hours to days. This discovery, published today in Nature, could help solve one of the world’s most pressing environmental problems: what to do with the billions of tons of plastic waste piling up in landfills and polluting our natural lands and water. The enzyme has the potential to supercharge recycling on a large scale that would allow major industries to reduce their environmental impact by recovering and reusing plastics at the molecular level.

New applications in energy, defense and telecommunications could receive a boost after a team at The University of Texas at Austin created a new type of “nanocrystal gel” — a gel composed of tiny nanocrystals each 10,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair that are linked together into an organized network.

Jodie L. Lutkenhaus (B.S. Chemical Engineering 2002), professor in the Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical Engineering at Texas A&M University and alumna of the Cockrell School's McKetta Department of Chemical Engineering, is the recipient of the 2022 Edith and Peter O’Donnell Award in Engineering from The Academy of Medicine, Engineering and Science of Texas (TAMEST). She was chosen for her innovation and development of redox active polymers for metal-free energy storage and smart coatings.

Honeywell plans to commercialize carbon capture technology created by researchers at The University of Texas at Austin that holds the promise of significantly reducing carbon dioxide emissions from many industrial sources.

Five engineers and scientists from The University of Texas at Austin have been selected as fellows of the National Academy of Inventors, a prestigious distinction awarded to a select group of 164 academic innovators around the world for 2021. The new UT Austin fellows include four from the Cockrell School of Engineering and one from the College of Natural Sciences. They join 16 previous inductees from UT Austin.

The American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists (AAPS) has recognized Nicholas Peppas with their 2021 Global Leader Award. The AAPS Global Leader Award recognizes a leader working in pharmaceutical science, technology, engineering, or education whose contributions to the field have resulted in outstanding positive impact on education and public health.

Scientists and engineers at The University of Texas at Austin have created a hydrogel tablet that can rapidly purify contaminated water. One tablet can disinfect a liter of river water and make it suitable for drinking in an hour or less.

Anyone using a cellphone, laptop or electric vehicle depends on lithium. The element is in tremendous demand. And although the supply of lithium around the world is plentiful, getting access to it and extracting it remains a challenging and inefficient process. An interdisciplinary team of engineers and scientists is developing a way to extract lithium from contaminated water. New research, published this week in Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, could simplify the process of extracting lithium from aqueous brines, potentially create a much larger supply and reduce costs of the element for batteries to power electric vehicles, electronics and a wide range of other devices. Currently, lithium is most commonly sourced from salt brines in South America using solar evaporation, a costly process that can take years and loses much of the lithium along the way.

Solar has undergone a transformation over the past 10 years. In 2011 in the U.S., photovoltaic devices, or solar cells, provided enough electricity to power about 170,000 homes. As of May 2021, solar accounted for 5.1% of the U.S. electricity mix — enough to power more than 12 million homes. This dramatic increase in the use of solar power is mostly due to technology advancements and reduced costs. Now, with major governmental and corporate entities setting net-zero carbon emissions goals by 2050, the use of solar-generated electricity must continue to grow even more in order to realize these sustainability targets. To contribute to these enormous goals, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded a Phase III Industry/University Cooperative Research Center (IUCRC) grant to The University of Texas at Austin to lead the Center for Solar Powered Future (SPF2050) with partner institution Colorado State University.

Nicholas Peppas has been elected president of Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Honor Society, an international society for science and engineering. His three-year term began on July 1, 2021, and Peppas will help lead the organization’s continued focused on core goals of enhancing the health of the research enterprise, fostering integrity in science and engineering, and promoting the public's understanding of science.

The demand for clean energy has never been higher, and it has created a global race to develop new technologies as alternatives to fossil fuels. Among the most tantalizing of these green energy technologies is fuel cells. They use hydrogen as fuel to cleanly produce electricity and could power everything from long-haul trucks to major industrial processes. However, fuel cells are held back by sluggish kinetics in a part of the core chemical reaction that limits efficiency. But, researchers from The University of Texas at Austin have discovered new dynamics that could supercharge this reaction using iron-based single-atom catalysts.