Dr. Reid C. Van Lehn
Conway Assistant Professor,
Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering,
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Website
Bio:
Reid is the Conway Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He received his
Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from MIT under the supervision of Prof. Alfredo Alexander-Katz, then performed research as a NIH Ruth-Kirshstein postdoctoral fellow with Prof. Tom F. Miller III at Caltech before joining UW-Madison in May 2016. He
has recently been recognized with the AIChE CoMSEF Young Investigator Award, 3M Non-Tenured Faculty Award, the UW-Madison Vilas Associate Award, and an NSF CAREER award.
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"Molecular Modeling of Solvent Effects for Biomass Conversion and Plastic Recycling"
Thursday, March 24, 2022
3:00 p.m. – 4:15 p.m.
FRNY G140
Liquid-phase chemical and physical processes for the deconstruction, separation, and recovery of natural and synthetic polymers depend
critically upon the solvent environment. In this talk, I will discuss our efforts to combine molecular-scale simulations and data-centric modeling to understand and predict the influence of solvent composition on processes relevant to biomass conversion and
plastic recycling. I will first discuss computational methods to predict reaction rates for the acid-catalyzed hydrolysis and dehydration of biomass-derived oxygenates using classical molecular dynamics simulations. By characterizing solvent structure at the
nanoscale, we quantitatively predict experimental reaction rates without modeling reaction mechanisms. I will then discuss a computational approach to select solvents for the selective dissolution of polymers from plastic waste. We demonstrate that effective
solvent selection permits the recovery of nearly 100 wt% of the components of commercial multilayer plastic films. These computational models thus permit the rational design of solvent systems based on molecular-scale insight.
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