Eric Sarbacker

esarbacker3 at gatech dot edu
B.S., Chemical Engineering: Pennsylvania State University (2023)

Project: Ethylene epoxidation over promoted Ag catalysts

Project Description: Ethylene oxide (EO), a high-value organic building block essential for the production of materials, industrial solutions/solvents, surfactants, and consumer goods, is manufactured through the epoxidation of ethylene over promoted silver catalysts. Despite decades of research, the structure and phase of the catalytic active silver surface, the form of reactive oxygen species, the reaction mechanism, and how various promoters, such as chlorine, increase epoxidation selectivity, however, remain unclear. To address these fundamental questions, this project couples in operando Raman spectroscopy and rate measurements with computational methods (Collaborator: Prof. Chris Paolucci at University of Virginia) including density functional theory (DFT), molecular dynamics (MD), and Grand Canonical Monte Carlo (GCMC) to understand the surface of silver catalysts and reaction kinetics at industrial relevant conditions. The knowledge we learn in this project is also anticipated to guide the development and understanding of other selective oxidation reactions with metal nanoparticles.