Research

Design and Development of Heterogeneous Catalysts for Sustainable Upgrading Biomass and Plastic Waste to Value-Added Chemicals and Fuels 

The rapid growth of the human population, urbanization, and technological development worldwide, has led to a dramatic increase in energy consumption. Meanwhile, the only dependable current energy resource known as traditional fossil fuel resources, crude oil, coal, natural gas, and petroleum reserves, is decreasing. In 2020, about 83 % of energy to be consumed worldwide was derived from traditional fossil resources. The high consumption of fossil fuels resources associated release of toxic gases result in negative environmental impacts such as climate change and global warming. Similarly, plastic products are discarded to the environment by the consumers and create a threat to the environment and   ecology of the system. Global plastic production and utilization more than doubled from 2000 to 2020 to reach ~450 million tonnes, and it is predicted to keep rising in the coming years. At present, only ~10% of plastic waste is recycled, and another ~19 % is incinerated, ~50% is landfill, and ~20% evades the waste management system. The increasing energy demand, high consumption of fossile fuel and global warming mitigation actions motivate to exploring sustainable and green alternatives such as biomass and plastic waste to fullfill the need of high energy demand. So far, the chemical waste treatment method, especially catalytic hydrogenation/hydrogenolysis, is the most efficient and beneficial method, which aims to transform biomass and plastic waste into high-value chemicals and fuels. The top ten listed plastic used globally include PET, PS, PPO, PC, and Biomass composed lignincellulose are excellent sources to produce arene, alkanes and heterocyclic compound. Moreover, cellulose/ hemicellulose provides a wide range of furans, diols, linear alkanes, while lignin and aromatic plastic provides a wide range of areans and cycloakane by selective cleavage of C−C, C−O, and C=C bonds. During the past decade, biomass valorization has been extensively studied by various eminent researchers like Prof. Rajendra Verma (U.S Envir. Protection agency and Palacky univ.), Prof. Adam Lee (RMIT univ. Australia), Prof. Rafael Luque (Cordoba univ. Spain), Prof. Ning yan (National Univ. of Singapore), and Prof. Roberto Rinaldi (Imperial College, London) as well as the domestic researcher such as Prof. Ganpati Yadav (ICT, Mumbai), Dr. Chandrashekhar Rode (NCL, Pune), Prof. Rajendra Srivastava (IIT Ropar), Prof. Bhalchandra Bhanage (ICT, Mumbai), Dr. Darbha Srinivasa (CSIR-NCL Pune), Prof. KK Pant (IIT Delhi), and many other eminent Indian scientists. Only a few kinds of literature are available for upgrading plastic waste by hydrogenation/ hydrogenolysis by Prof. George Huber (Univ. of Wisconsin- Madison, U.S), Prof. Ning Yan (National Univ. of Singapore), and Dr. Xi Chen (Jiao Tong Univ. Shanghai). According to  researchers statements, the activation chemistry of C−C/C−O and C=C suggests that metal with good hydrogenation properties and strong acidic support is required to overcome these challenges. Still, very few sustainable and economical catalysts realize this ambitious goal. To overcomes these challenges, in this our work helps to improve the efficiency of conventional catalysts and design novel multifunctional catalysts to reduce the process cost, systematic experiments with optimizing reaction conditions to improve the conversion and product selectivity, establish the structure-activity relation, and propose the reaction mechanism.