Chemical Engineering graduate students Tej Choksi, Phil Kester and Ravi Joshi, with the help of Professors Rajamani Gounder, Jeffrey Greeley and Volkan Ortalan (Materials Engineering), graduate student Chang Wan (Materials Engineering), and undergraduate assistant Hasson Richardson, led research projects and hands on activities related to catalysis and energy for a group of high school students and teachers from Indiana and Ohio as part of the 2016 Duke Energy Academy at Purdue on Wednesday, June 22, 2016.

The theme of the project was Catalysis for Energy Innovation and featured a presentation, demonstrations, and hands-on activities to introduce the students to the theory and practice of catalysis. Tej Choksi, advised by Professor Greeley, explained how modern supercomputers allow researchers to study the atomic-level behavior of catalysts and how computational tools are combined with experimental studies to learn about the fundamental underpinnings of catalysis and chemistry. Ravi Joshi, who is advised by Professor Gounder, performed demonstrations of how catalysts work and how catalytic reactions are critical to fuel cell technology.

A group of 11 high school students and 4 high school teachers worked with a transmission electron microscope (TEM) at Purdue’s Birck Nanotechnology Center to see how this powerful instrument allows imaging individual atoms on the surface of a catalyst. The students also utilized their research skills by assembling and testing an ethanol fuel cell. By experimenting with solutions containing different amounts of fuel and water or with fuel solutions of different temperature, the students observed how fuel concentration and temperature affect the power output from the fuel cell, which is an important concept in both chemical kinetics and electrocatalysis.

The day ended with an hour-long lecture and hands-on activity with the entire Duke Energy Academy group of 42 high school students and 42 high school teachers. Participants learned about how to design catalyst surfaces to promote reactions, using hydrogen peroxide synthesis from hydrogen and oxygen as an example of “green” chemistry. Students and teachers were able to use ball-and-stick models of different atoms and surface facets of a platinum catalyst, together with theory calculations, to observe how specific locations (binding sites) on the catalyst surface are important to performing a reaction and how theoretical models can help guide the discovery of new catalytic materials.