Ozone is a highly reactive compound that is harmful at very low concentrations as compared to other pollutants. One method of pollution control is the use of photocatalysis, specifically with titanium dioxide to induce ozone decomposition. An experiment was designed and executed in order to determine the rate of decomposition by coating concrete in 5% by weight titanium dioxide mixed with paint. The experiment was unsuccessful in inducing decomposition but gave important insight into the adsorptive properties of ozone over surfaces, particularly with bare concrete that had an adsorption of 22.51 ± 2.457 ppbv, which was much better than the coated samples. Further studies into the development of photocatalytic paint is needed in order to develop an effective urban ozone pollution control method to be implemented in major cities, particularly in the most polluted such as Los Angeles, California.

MAX phases are layered hexagonal early transition metal carbides, sometimes nitrides, where M is an early transition metal, A is an A group element, most prominently groups 13 or 14, and X is either carbon or nitrogen.1 They are gaining a lot of attention because of their unusual properties. Particularly, their hardness, chemical stability at room temperature, and high melting points. These properties provide a material that is viable for a wide range of demanding applications.2,3 MAX phases display a combination of both ceramic and metallic characteristics. Furthermore, they also serve as a precursor for two-dimensional MXenes.4,5<br/>Generally, bulk synthesis of MAX phases is done through traditional solid state synthesis techniques. For example, three solid state synthesis techniques include solid state method, hot pressing and arc melting and annealing. During solid state method, the powder precursors are preheated between 350 and 400°C, allowing for decomposition of starting reagents and removal of volatile products leaving only the oxides. At this point the germination phase has completed, and the crystal growth phase begins. Under the effect of a concentration gradient and very high temperatures, cations migrate, forming well-ordered layers. Slow cooling rates are used in order to ensure crystallinity of the product.6 The second method, hot pressing, involves the mixing of powder precursors thoroughly and then cold pressed into a green body – a ceramic body powder pre-sintering. They are then heated under vacuum and often high pressure in order to form the product. Two variants of hot-pressing exits: reactive hot pressing, where the pressure during the reaction will vary throughout the reaction, and isostatic hot pressing, where the pressure is held constant throughout the entire reaction.7 Another solid-state technique is arc melting and annealing. During arc melting, alternating current is applied to the electrode inside an inert reactor, which is arranged as to generate an arc discharge. The heat produced by arcing causes rapid melting of the samples.8 While these methods are most common, they are not always viable due to the specialized equipment required in order to achieve the high temperature and pressure conditions. Furthermore, these specific techniques don’t allow for high control over particle size and morphology. <br/>Because of this, alternative, non-conventional synthesis techniques have been developed involving more readily available tube furnaces and microwaves, which lack the extreme pressures instead opting for ambient conditions.9 Sol-gel techniques have been developed by the group of Christina Birkel, and have successfully produced MAX phases through calcination of homogeneous citric acid-based gel-precursors. Some advantages of using these gel-precursors include shorter diffusion paths, and faster mass transport, thus, resulting in lower reaction temperatures and shorter reaction times. Ultimately, this allows for control over particle morphology and size.10<br/>The focus of this work is to discover optimal synthesis conditions to create spherical Cr2GaC. Spherical MAX phases have been briefly explored in existing literature using polymer-based hollow microsphere templates.10 These polymer microspheres have been used to synthesize spherical metal oxides. This is achieved by heating the metal oxide precursors which adhere to the spheres, then by thermal treatment, the template is then removed.11 <br/>Two different microsphere templates will be explored to study the advantages and disadvantages of different size distributions and surface conditions of the spheres. Furthermore, reaction temperature, reaction time, citric acid equivalents, and gel to microsphere ratio will be altered to determine optimal synthesis parameters for depositing Cr2GaC onto spherical templates. Cr2GaC serves as a model compound because it has been successfully synthesized through sol-gel chemistry in the past.10 This phase will be prepared through non-conventional sol-gel chemistry, with various heating profiles, both furnace and microwave, and will be characterized through X-ray diffraction (XRD), and Rietveld refinement. Further, the morphology and atomic composition will be analyzed through scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS).

This study was conducted in order to better understand the ways in which social and environmental justice curriculum would suit engineers. In particular, it focuses on how social and environmental justice are valued in engineering and the internal and external barriers engineers face in pursuing it. The research first discusses the role of engineering in social and environmental justice, followed by common engineering ideologies and existing interactions between engineers and justice. The results in this paper presents the findings of qualitative data analysis of transcriptions of interviews conducted with engineers regarding social and environmental justice. The responses of interviewees were organized into different categories of value and obstacles were identified, analyzed, and discussed. The interpretations presented in this paper are tentative and are a part of an ongoing study that will be released at a later date.

Flavonoids are important biomolecules with a variety of pharmaceutical and agricultural applications. Currently, isolating these compounds is done by plant extraction, however this process is hindered by large land and energy requirements. Previous groups have aimed to overcome these challenges by engineering microbes to produce these important compounds, however this is largely bottlenecked by the lack of intercellular malonyl-CoA availability. To remedy this, the genes matB and matC have been identified as coding for malonyl-CoA synthase and a putative dicarboxylate carrier protein, respectively. Other works have successfully engineered two variants, Streptomyces coelicolor and Rhizobium trifolii, of these genes into Escherichia coli, however this has yet to be accomplished in Gram-positive Corynebacterium glutamicum. Additionally, other groups have neglected to attempt tuning these genes with respect to one another by inserting in front of different inducible promoters. This study has successfully assembled two plasmids containing the Streptomyces coelicolor and Rhizobium trifolii variants of both matB and matC. Preliminary fermentations and GCMS results confirmed that little to none naringenin was produced without the matB-matC module. Additionally, preliminary fermentations revealed that the DelAro1 and DelAro3 strains can be used to reduce metabolism of aromatics like naringenin.

Ammonia is one of the most important chemicals for modern civilization as well as a potentially invaluable intermediary component of a future sustainable H2 economy, yet its current production is decidedly unsustainable. Accordingly, researchers are attempting to devise new paradigms for ammonia production, one of which would involve the cyclical reaction of H2 with a nitride compound and the renitridation of that compound with N2 - a thermochemical loop that would allow for ammonia production with renewable inputs and at relatively low pressures. In this paper, researchers identified several ternary and quaternary metal nitrides with the potential to exhibit relatively favorable thermodynamics for both the reduction and nitridation steps of that reaction cycle. These compounds were synthesized via co-precipitation and Pechini synthesis and several were tested under gas flows of 75% H2/Ar at 100-700 C and 75% H2/N2 at 700 C to determine their behavior under these conditions. As suggested by the available literature, Co3Mo3N was found to be a far better candidate for thermochemical looping than Fe3Mo3N or Ni2Mo3N - with higher mass loss and mass regain. Interestingly, quaternary nitrides containing Fe and Co in addition to Mo also demonstrated remarkable reduction and nitridation capability under ambient pressures. Ultimately, this paper demonstrates the feasibility of synthesizing a variety of single phase ternary and quaternary nitrides and the potential that several of these nitrides hold for producing ammonia sustainably via cyclic thermochemistry.

Esters are important solvents in multiple industries including adhesives, food, and pharmaceuticals. Although esters are biodegradable solvents, the conventional process of producing them is not eco-friendly because they are largely derived from petrochemicals. This has led scientists to consider implementing biological routes in their production process by incorporating heterologous or improving inherent esterification pathways. However, due to inequality in the biosynthesis of esters and their precursors (organic acid and alcohol), a significant amount of precursors are left unconverted, thereby lowering overall esterification efficiency. Therefore, the primary goal of the current research is to improve the ester titers by incorporating one more step of in vitro esterification with the culture broth, thereby esterifying the unconverted precursors using high efficiency commercial enzymes in the presence of compatible organic solvent. In principle, the medium containing the precursors will be treated with the enzyme in presence of organic solvent, where the precursors will be distributed in both the phases, aqueous and organic, based on their polarity, and the enzymatic esterification will happen at the interface. Hence, as a first step, efforts were made to optimize the reaction conditions, beginning with choosing the most efficient organic solvent and corresponding enzyme candidate. Our results showed that, for production of ethyl acetate through this reactive extraction approach, Novozyme435 exhibited significant esterification with chloroform, with almost 85% conversion efficiency. Further optimizations with phase ratios, pH and incubation time showed that the pH 6.0 (3.1 g/L) was the most optimum where ethyl acetate titer was found to improve 10 times than that at pH 7.0 (0.164 g/L) with the phase ratio of 1:1. The kinetic studies further added that the incubation at 37oC gives the maximum ethyl acetate production within 8h. After initial optimization studies, cell broth from E. coli cells transformed to overproduce an esterase was also tested with the reactive extraction method. It was found that there was a ~7.5X decrease in ethyl acetate production in the cell media versus synthetic samples with the same concentration of reactants. Such a large decrease indicates that enzymatic promiscuity or inhibition currently prevent the cell samples from reaching the same conversion as synthetic studies. To characterize the maximum reaction rate (Vmax) and affinity constants of the substrates to Novozym 435, further kinetic studies were performed with one minute of reaction. The mathematical model employed assumes that enzyme kinetics rather than diffusion was the rate limiting step, that the concentrations of reactants at the interface are equivalent to the initial concentration of reactants, and that neither substrate is an inhibitor. Vmax was found to be 18.5 Mmol min-1g-1 (of catalyst used), and the affinity constants were 0.957 M and 0.00557 M for acetic acid and ethanol respectively. Vmax was similar to literature values with Novozym 435, and the affinity constants indicate a much higher binding efficiency of ethanol in comparison to acetic acid, indicating that a cocktail of esters are likely produced from Novozym 435 in cell broth. Overall, moving away from fossil-fuel dependence is necessary to promote sustainable industry standards, and microbial cell factories combined with reactive extraction, if optimized for industrial applications, can replace harmful environmental procedures. By optimizing the reactive extraction process for ester production, biorefineries could become more competitive and economically feasible for numerous applications.