Chemical and Biological Engineering Professor Maria Flytzani-Stephanopoulos will tonight present the Inaugural Haber Professorship Lecture.
Flytzani-Stephanopoulos, who was named the first Robert and Marcy Haber Endowed Professor in Energy Sustainability, will give a lecture entitled "Doing More With Less: Nano and Atomic-scale Catalysts for Energy Sustainability" at 3 p.m. in Nelson Auditorium in Anderson Hall. Flytzani-Stephanopoulos spoke with the Daily yesterday about the lecture.
Corinne Segal: What topic will you address in your lecture?
Maria Flytzani-Stephanopoulos: The title is ‘Doing More With Less' — I'm going to basically develop this topic to connect our research with nanocatalysts for energy sustainability, what kind of role nanocatalysts will play in finding a variety of solutions [to problems] we face today in the environment. I will talk in general terms about the energy crisis, the big energy challenge that we have globally and energy poverty.
I will point out what the barriers are for the arrival of new technology. … I'll talk a little bit about fuel cells and what barrier is there — properly designing the materials, which a lot of environmentalists and scientists are working on everywhere right now, and trying to reduce the amount that we use and be smart about how we use it, how we prepare it, and to have it stable, and to do the job.
It's all focused on materials because that's what I'm working with — catalytic materials and metals and how to reduce the cost of all of this new processes and new materials that we are making, so that they become affordable, not just here in the [United States], but globally, and new technologies [can] have much smaller carbon footprints. This is the essence of the talk.
CS: What is the focus of your research?
MFS: All the subjects I will cover in the talk have elements from the work that we are doing. It is on nanoscale catalysts for energy. I am talking on the topic of my research, in a way. The Haber chair is in energy sustainability, so the work I'm doing is in energy sustainability. By going smaller and having better designed materials, we hope to make the next generation of these processes affordable and materialized. There is a real, immediate applied side to the research that we're doing, which is fundamental.
The tracks of the models that we're developing are new energy materials, new catalysts for energy application materials, which is a new process, including the new fuel process to make hydrogen for fuel cells for new applications, including methanol and other alcohols-processing to make hydrogen for potential applications such as a car, and also for making new liquid biofuels to be used in that case. It's all around energy, bioenergy and green energy.
CS: In what way can economizing these materials be beneficial?
MFS: The cost goes down tremendously and makes the new technology affordable and ready to compete with the existing ones, which we are locked into for the moment. We have technology … and we cannot move quite fast enough, [like] the way we move fast with information technology. Energy is a little sluggish to move over the technology, and there are many reasons for this, and one is the present state of those technologies.
CS: In what way is your research sustainable?
MFS: We are making catalysts for environmental applications, either to convert pollutants to innocuous materials, which we have done mostly in the past — doing that with sulfur, for example. That's my area. Making catalysts, studying catalysts, and so on. Making some from a renewable source. Converting this with the proper catalyst to make hydrogen or using it directly in a fuel cell.
All of these things are conducive to making the energy that we need — the same units, the same energy that we want to use for a given service, making it with less material, more efficiently — that saves energy. So that is directly impacting not only the clean energy, but also the more efficiency and productivity, which fails in term of carbon emissions. So these things are directly related. If you can produce the same amount of energy with less fuel or with better efficiency, then you are saving in terms of carbon emissions. It is around the ideals of diminishing or decreasing our carbon footprints in all of these processes that the catalysts would be used for.
CS: What is a main point from your lecture you want the audience to remember?
MFS: There is hope through this advanced technology to really address the big global issues of energy sustainability, which is present because of development of the world and emerging economies. This is a big issue and it has many facets and it does need thinking out of the box, but it of course would require the proper policies to be put in place and one cannot go without the other. We will be responsible for the policies that we apply, and this will determine the outcome of whether we will be successful with all of this advanced technology. While I will focus on technology, the message in the end is all this is absolutely necessary, and also that time is of the essence because we are really on the verge of having irreversible effects come upon us. We need to act. We need to act quickly.
