Electroreduction of CO2 and Quantification in New Transition-Metal-Based Deep Eutectic Solvents Using Single-Atom Ag Electrocatalyst.

Deep eutectic solvents (DESs) are efficient media for CO2 capture, and an electroreduction process using the deterministic surface of single-atom electrocatalysts is a facile way to screen gas absorption capacities of novel DESs. Using newly prepared transition-metal-based DESs indexed as TDESs, the interfacial mechanism, detection, quantification, and coordination modes of CO2 were determined for the first time. The CO2 has a minimum detection time of 300 s, whereas 500 s of continous ambient CO2 saturation provided ZnCl2/ethanolamine (EA) (1:4) and CoCl2/EA (1:4) TDESs with a maximum CO2 absorption capacity of 0.2259 and 0.1440 mmol/L, respectively. The results indicated that CO2 coordination modes of η1 (C) and η2 (O, O) with Zn in ZnCl2/EA (1:4) TDESs are conceivable. We found that the transition metals in TDESs form an interface at the compact layer of the electrocatalyst, while CO2 •-/CO2 reside in the diffuse layer. These findings are important because they provide reliable inferences about interfacial phenomena for facile screening of CO2 capture capacity of DESs or other green solvents.

Broadening the polyethylene molecular weight distribution by controlling the hydrogen concentration and catalyst feed rates.

This paper discusses the control of an industrial gas-phase polyethylene reactor to produce a desired molecular weight distribution (MWD) of the polymer. The controller objective is to regulate online the entire molecular weight distribution by either manipulating the hydrogen content inside the reactor or coordinating the feed rates of two different types of catalysts. In this work, the molecular weight distribution is modeled as a function of the reaction kinetics and hydrogen to monomer ratio. Nonlinear model predictive controller (NLMPC) algorithm is used to maintain the desired molecular weight distribution online. The closed-loop simulations indicated the effectiveness of NLMPC to achieve its goal even in the presence of modeling errors. Moreover, the results showed that, altering the hydrogen concentration solely can produce the required polymer quality provided that an efficient mechanism is available to readily alter the hydrogen composition. Alternatively, the desired MWD can also be guaranteed with proper manipulation of the catalyst feed rates while the other process inputs are kept constant.