Sohan Bir Singh

Title : Desulfurization by reactive adsorption over zinc oxide based adsorbents

Abstract:

The residue sulfur in transportation fuels is one of the major sources of air pollution. This study investigated the room temperature adsorptive removal of thiophene as a sulfur compound over zinc oxide adsorbents in the presence of hydrogen. The bulk zinc oxide was prepared by precipitation method and calcined at different temperatures in the range of 300-550 °C. Supported zinc oxide was prepared by co-precipitation of 30 wt.% ZnO with alumina and calcined at 550 °C. Properties of the adsorbents were determined by various characterization techniques such as surface area and pore volume analysis, XRD, FESEM, EDX and TPR. The desulfurization process was carried out in a down-flow packed bed reactor at room temperature (30 °C). The BET surface area of bulk zinc oxide adsorbents decreased with the increase in calcination temperature from 300 to 550 °C. The surface area of bulk zinc oxide adsorbents was 30.5 and 14.6 m2/g when calcined at 300 and 550 °C, respectively. The surface area of supported zinc oxide adsorbents was 177 m2/g. The highest average pore size was obtained for bulk ZnO calcined at 550 °C (45 nm) compared to that calcined at 300 °C (42 nm) and supported ZnO (27 nm). The XRD peaks corresponded to the hexagonal structure of zinc oxide. The removal of thiophene was most significant for bulk ZnO calcined at 550 °C. The higher removal efficiency for this adsorbent in spite of lower surface area may be attributed to its higher percentage of larger pores and higher average pore size.

Biography:

I am presently working as a postdoctoral research associate at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, USA. Where, I’m involved in two projects funded by the U.S. Department of Energy; 1. Production of carbon nanomaterials and sorbents from domestic U.S. coal, 2. Development of coal-based supercapacitor materials for energy storage. I received my Ph.D. and master’s degree in chemical engineering from Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, India, where I have developed low-cost templated carbons, graphene, silica materials and ZnO-based adsorbents for hydrogen storage, CO2 capture and desulfurization applications. I have contributed to 10 publications in peer-reviewed international journals, presented research work at 8 national and international conferences and attended 5 workshops. With that, I reviewed more than 60 research papers and I am serving as Editorial member of three research journals.