Plastic bottles and waste CO₂ could become raw materials for new products rather than environmental pollutants, if chemists can design the right catalysts to drive the chemical reactions that make this possible. Most plastics today are made from fossil fuels and are difficult to recycle into high-quality materials. The same is true for carbon dioxide—it is abundant but chemically stable, making it hard to convert into useful chemicals. This project aims to solve both problems by discovering new organometallic catalysts that can perform (de)hydrogenation reactions—adding or removing hydrogen atoms to break down or build up molecules. If successful, the research would demonstrate the first closed-loop production of renewable plastics such as polyesters and polyurethanes, where the same catalyst both builds the plastic from renewable feedstocks and breaks it back down for recycling. It would also convert waste CO₂ into carbon monoxide, a valuable chemical feedstock, using catalysts inspired by a natural enzyme found in bacteria. A second, practical outcome could be a hydrogen storage system based on glycerol and polyester, enabling renewable energy to be stored and released on demand. The project combines mechanistic organometallic chemistry with machine learning and automated reactors to predict and test new catalyst designs. It is fundamental science with a clear applied goal: providing the chemical technologies needed to make a circular economy work at scale.
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The vision of this program is to discover new catalysts for (de)hydrogenation reactions and utilize them to solve two of the most important challenges of the circular economy: (a) closed-loop production of renewable plastics, and (b) CO2 utilization. The first goal of this program is to discover new organometallic catalysts/catalytic processes to demonstrate the closed-loop production of renewable plastics (polyesters, polyamides, polycarbonates, and polyurethanes) for the first time. The synthesis will be carried via the dehydrogenative coupling of renewable diols/(and) diamines/(and) methanol and the recycling process will be carried via the reverse reaction i.e. catalytic hydrogenative depolymerisation of plastics. The discovered process will also be demonstrated for its application in developing an efficient and renewable hydrogen storage material based on glycerol/polyester couple. The second goal of this program is to discover new organometallic catalysts for the reverse water gas shift reaction (CO2 + H2 = CO + H2O) that will convert "waste" CO2 to the valuable chemical feedstock - CO. The catalyst design will be based on bimetallic complexes of Ni, and Fe inspired by the [Ni-Fe]-carbon monoxide dehydrogenase (CODHase) enzyme. The catalyst discoveries will be carried out synergistically using a two-pronged approach - (i) carrying mechanistic studies using the toolbox of organometallic chemistry e.g. bond activation, catalytic studies, kinetics, and DFT computation, and (ii) predicting catalyst design using data science and machine learning for which datasets of suitable quality will be generated using automated (de)hydrogenation reactors. Overall, this program will integrate the approaches of organometallic chemistry and data science to discover fundamentally new catalysts to provide the chemical technologies necessary to allow humanity to prosper through the sustainability, environmental, and economic benefits of making the circular economy a reality.
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