{"id":58607,"date":"2018-11-23T07:29:53","date_gmt":"2018-11-23T06:29:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/?p=58607"},"modified":"2018-11-21T12:59:26","modified_gmt":"2018-11-21T11:59:26","slug":"nrel-nitrilation-process-produces-acrylonitrile-attention-and-awards","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/nrel-nitrilation-process-produces-acrylonitrile-attention-and-awards\/","title":{"rendered":"NREL: Nitrilation Process Produces Acrylonitrile, Attention, and Awards"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"20180928-sanchez-i-nogue-lab-corps\"
Violeta S\u00e1nchez i Nogu\u00e9 is a member of the research team that pioneered NREL’s nitrilation-to-acrylonitrile process\u2014a multi-award winning technology.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A clean, cost-competitive pathway to a $7 billion market is an attention grabber. NREL\u2019s nitrilation process to produce a bio-based acrylonitrile has done just that. In recent months the new technology has grabbed attention \u2026 and awards. This summer alone, the process technology has been recognized with the Federal Laboratory Consortium (FLC) Mid-Continent Region Notable Technology Development Award, the CO-Labs Governor\u2019s Award, and has been named a 2018 R&D 100 Award finalist.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve long been excited about the prospects of the nitrilation chemistry,\u201d said NREL Associate Laboratory Director Adam Bratis, who was the principal investigator of the Renewable Carbon Fiber Consortium where the research got its start. \u201cIt\u2019s nice to see that others are recognizing its potential, too.\u201d<\/p>\n

The award-winning research that led to the nitrilation process development was an interdisciplinary collaboration of researchers across chemical engineering, biology, and computational modeling, including NREL\u2019s Bratis, Gregg Beckham, Eric Karp, Violeta S\u00e0nchez i Nogu\u00e9, and Vassili Vorotnikov, as well as other contributors from NREL, the University of Colorado Boulder, the Colorado School of Mines, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Johnson Matthey, and the Mid-Atlantic Technology, Research & Innovation Center.<\/p>\n

A Commodity Chemical, but Can it Be Cleaner?<\/h3>\n

Their goal was a cleaner path to acrylonitrile, a major commodity chemical employed in many diverse, commercial applications\u2014from clothing to carpets to plastics.<\/p>\n

Additionally, acrylonitrile can be polymerized to polyacrylonitrile, which is the primary building block in carbon fiber composites. Because of its many advantageous physical properties\u2014high strength, light weight, high temperature tolerance, and high chemical resistance\u2014carbon fiber has become extremely important in today\u2019s world. Its unique properties have made it popular in the civil engineering, military, and motorsports industries, as well as in an increasing number of other consumer and technical applications including increasing wind turbine efficiency.<\/p>\n

Perhaps most importantly, carbon fiber can be used for lightweighting applications in automotive and air transportation, as well as the aerospace industry\u2014replacing heavier materials like steel with lightweight carbon fibers to lower vehicle weight and improve fuel efficiency. For example, replacing the steel and aluminum used in today\u2019s cars would result in the fuel economy of the average car increasing by nearly 50% and greenhouse gas emissions being reduced by 20%\u201340%. As a result, the demand for carbon fibers is projected to increase 11%\u201318% annually.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, nearly all commercial acrylonitrile is produced today via an energy-intensive, chemically hazardous, petroleum-based process. But times are changing.<\/p>\n

Nitrilation Process\u2014What\u2019s Old Is New Again<\/h3>\n

NREL\u2019s new nitrilation technology produces near-100% yields of cost-competitive acrylonitrile\u2014representing a huge market\u2014from non-food biomass. A renewable alternative to the petrochemical method, nitrilation eliminates toxic byproducts, requires less energy, uses inexpensive catalysts, and can be performed in a simple reactor configuration with no explosion hazards.<\/p>\n

The process is fundamentally different from the ammoxidation chemistry used in industry to produce acrylonitrile today. Unlike ammoxidation, which uses propylene from petroleum or natural gas, nitrilation can take advantage of the functionality present in bio-based feedstocks\u2014such as the oxygen present in the plants\u2014to produce fewer toxic byproducts in a safer reactor environment with simpler catalysts.<\/p>\n

Developing the new process took time and research and the \u201caha moment\u201d came when NREL\u2019s team uncovered a paper written in 1916 demonstrating how to transform an oxygen-containing feedstock (like biomass) into a nitrile product. NREL\u2019s team combined chemical insights from this 1916 report and others from 1973 and 1987 to develop the strategy to produce acrylonitrile. A bonus: They did it in a reactor configured similarly to those already used in industry today.<\/p>\n

Accolades<\/h3>\n

In presenting the Notable Technology Development Award to NREL, the FLC Mid-Continent Region selection committee said they considered the nitrilation process “an industry changing technology” and “the very definition of a disruptive technology.”<\/p>\n

The CO-Labs Governor\u2019s award is presented to a technology produced in the state of Colorado that has a significant impact on society. The selection committee made up of researchers from Colorado\u2019s research universities, professional scientific community, and science-oriented economic development experts \u00a0recognized the technology as \u201cbrilliant research.\u201d<\/p>\n

And, R&D Magazin<\/em>e recently announced that the nitrilation process to acrylonitrile is a 2018 R&D 100 finalist and recognized it as one of the nation\u2019s top technology products of the past year. The final R&D 100 winners will be announced in November.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Find more information on NREL\u2019s nitrilation process in Science<\/em>, \u201cRenewable Acrylonitrile Production<\/a>,\u201d and on nrel.gov, \u201cNREL Develops Novel Method to Produce Renewable Acrylonitrile<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A clean, cost-competitive pathway to a $7 billion market is an attention grabber. NREL\u2019s nitrilation process to produce a bio-based acrylonitrile has done just that. In recent months the new technology has grabbed attention \u2026 and awards. This summer alone, the process technology has been recognized with the Federal Laboratory Consortium (FLC) Mid-Continent Region Notable […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":59,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","nova_meta_subtitle":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5572],"tags":[10408],"supplier":[15141,6053,15140,3799,14059,371,2437,5374],"class_list":["post-58607","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bio-based","tag-greenchemistry","supplier-co-labs","supplier-colorado-school-of-mines","supplier-federal-laboratory-consortium-flc","supplier-johnson-matthey","supplier-mid-atlantic-technology-research-innovation-center-matric","supplier-national-renewable-energy-laboratory-nrel","supplier-oak-ridge-national-laboratory","supplier-university-of-colorado-boulder"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58607","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/59"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58607"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58607\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58607"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58607"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58607"},{"taxonomy":"supplier","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/supplier?post=58607"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}