Upcycled plastic membrane helps clean up waste

Plant-derived biosolvents enable the sustainable conversion of plastic waste into valuable membrane materials

10-Feb-2023 - Plastic waste can be used as a raw material for making high performance porous membranes. These could then be used in the chemical industry for the energy-efficient separation of complex chemical mixtures or to clean up waste streams, furtheradding to the environmental appeal of the ...

Smarter sensor sniffs out target gases

A chemical sensor endowed with artificial intelligence can learn to detect certain gases in the air with high sensitivity and selectivity

16-Nov-2022 - The device, developed at KAUST, uses machine learning to differentiate the gases according to the way they induce slight temperature changes in the sensor as they interact with it. Smart electronic sensors that can detect specific airborne molecules are in great demand for use in applications ...

Greening hydrocarbon separation and crude oil refining

Polymer-based membranes that selectively separate hydrocarbon and crude oil mixtures could eclipse current industrial thermal processes

01-Sep-2022 - Polymer-based membranes developed at KAUST could enable greener and cheaper industrial separation approaches. Their stability and selectivity can be tuned by thermal crosslinking to separate simple hydrocarbon mixtures and complex crude oil fractions. Separation processes, such as distillation ...

Tip tricks control reactions in a single molecule

Pulses from an atom-sharp tip enable researchers to break and form chemical bonds at will

31-Aug-2022 - Chemical reactions often produce messy mixtures of different products. Hence, chemists spend a lot of time coaxing their reactions to be more selective to make particular target molecules. Now, an international team of researchers has achieved that kind of selectivity by delivering voltage pulses ...

Smog clears on car exhaust catalyst design

Systematic study resolves a debate on the best combination of metals to catalytically clean NOx from vehicle emissions

09-Jun-2022 - Smog-producing chemicals could be almost eliminated from the tailpipes of diesel cars and vans, using a new exhaust catalyst concept developed at KAUST. After systematically studying multiple catalyst compositions, the research team identified the ideal atomic recipe to catalytically remove NOx ...

Methane from Carbon Dioxide

Efficient catalyst for the light-driven methanation of CO2

19-Nov-2021 - Recycling carbon dioxide (CO2), especially through conversion to methane (CH4), is compelling while anthropogenic CO2 emissions are still rising. A useful process for this transformation is photothermal methanation, in which CO2 and hydrogen are catalytically converted into CH4 and water upon ...

Recruiting bacteria to build catalysts atom by atom

An enigmatic bacterium proves a useful ally for the synthesis of single-atom catalysts to split hydrogen from water

02-Jun-2021 - Exploiting the unusual metal-reducing ability of the iron-breathing bacterium Geobacter sulfurreducens, KAUST researchers have demonstrated a cheap and reliable way to synthesize highly active single-atom catalysts. The innovation, which could dramatically improve the efficiency and cost of ...

Understanding aromaticity in catalysis to unlock new opportunities

"Our discovery is not about identifying a new or better catalyst for a known reaction, but about opening a new field for unlimited new opportunities in the future"

05-May-2021 - Aromaticity, a concept usually used to explain the striking stability and unusual reactivity of certain carbon-based molecules, could inspire the design of new catalysts with novel uses, KAUST researchers have shown. Chemists first came upon the anomalous behavior of aromatic molecules in the ...

A chemical embrace from the perfect host

01-Apr-2020 - An industrial process that currently consumes vast amounts of energy in petrochemical plants around the globe could be replaced by an alternative process so efficient that it requires no heating or elevated pressure. Niveen Khashab from KAUST's Advanced Membranes and Porous Materials Center and ...

Catalyst switching means four become one

11-Nov-2019 - By juggling four different chemical reactions in a single flask, researchers at KAUST have combined four polymers to form a single multicrystalline substance. Materials that seamlessly combine multiple polymers potentially merge the best aspects of each material. The versatile new approach for ...