Owing to its low cost and large availability, lignocellulosic biomass is being studied worldwide as a feedstock for renewable liquid biofuels. Lignocellulosic biomass is not currently used as a liquid fuel because economical processes for its conversion have not yet been developed. Currently, there are several routes being studied to convert solid biomass into a liquid fuel which involve multip...

Anthropogenic volatile organic compounds (AVOC) often dominate the urban atmosphere and consist to a large degree of aromatic hydrocarbons (ArHC), such as benzene, toluene, xylenes, and trimethylbenzenes, e.g. from handling and combustion of fuels. These compounds are important precursors for the formation of secondary organic aerosol. Here we show that oxidation of aromatics with OH leads to a...

Aromaticity is one of the most important concepts in organic chemistry. A variety of metalla-aromatic compounds have been recently prepared and in most of those examples, the metal participates only in a monocyclic ring. In contrast, metal-bridged bicyclic aromatic molecules, in which a metal is shared between two aromatic rings, have been less developed. Herein, we report the first metal-bridg...

Zeolites are the catalytic workhorses of various relevant reactions, primarily because their acidic properties. However, there have been few studies on unraveling influence Al distribution acid-catalyzed reactions at mesoscopic and microscopic levels. Taking methanol-to-aromatics (MTA) process as a paradigm, we compared performance two H-ZSM-5 zeolites with comparable properties, except for dis...

physical and chemical properties of  crude oil, including viscosity and api gravity, are commonly inherited  from the  early organic matter, environmental conditions in which they were deposited and depth of burial of the source beds. api gravity increases in deeper burial due to higher thermal maturation of organic matter in the source rocks and consequently, generation of lighter saturated hy...

Secondary organic aerosol formation from m-xylene, toluene, and benzene N. L. Ng, J. H. Kroll, A. W. H. Chan, P. S. Chhabra, R. C. Flagan, and J. H. Seinfeld Departments of Chemical Engineering and Environmental Science and Engineering, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA current address: Aerodyne Research, Inc. 45 Manning Road, Billerica, MA 01821, USA Received: 1 March...

Personnel involved: Prof. Jack B. Howard, PI. Department of Chemical Engineering, MIT Dr. Henning Richter, Research Associate, Department of Chemical Engineering, MIT Murray J. Height, Graduate Student, Department of Chemical Engineering, MIT Timothy G. Benish, Graduate Student, Department of Chemical Engineering, MIT Dr. Peter Hebgen, Postdoctoral Associate, Department of Chemical Engineering,...