Jonas Baltrusaitis
Lehigh University, PA·Chemistry
Turning waste and cheap natural resources into useful chemicals depends on understanding the reactions that happen at the surfaces of solid materials. The lab's two projects take this question in different directions.
- Fields
Chemistry
Engineering
Earth & Environmental Science
- Topics
struvite
slow-release fertilizer
wastewater valorization
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Jul 2027
What they work on
- Synthesize struvite microcrystals with tailored iron content and characterize their chemical composition and physical properties, to predict how this wastewater-derived fertilizer behaves in the environment.
- Measure how struvite colloids with varying iron content photocatalytically transform laboratory stand-ins for dissolved organic matter in aquatic mixtures.
- Determine how catalyst surfaces generate radicals during oxidative coupling of methane, and whether surface or gas-phase reactions control selectivity, using vacuum-ultraviolet photoionization mass spectrometry at Sandia.
- Feed surface and gas-phase kinetic data into reactor design models to identify catalyst and reactor designs that convert methane selectively to ethane and ethylene, with a thousand-hour industrial catalyst durability test.
More about the research
One looks at struvite, a mineral fertilizer recovered from wastewater, and what reactions it drives in natural waters. The other looks at catalysts that could turn methane, the main part of natural gas, into more valuable hydrocarbons.
Why it matters
The struvite work could guide how wastewater-derived, slow-release fertilizers are engineered and managed. This may help farmers use them while limiting problems such as water eutrophication, the overgrowth of algae caused by excess nutrients. The methane work could help make OCM practical, offering a more efficient, lower-carbon way to turn natural gas into ethylene and other valuable chemicals for the energy and chemical industries.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Collaborative Research: Photocatalytic Chemistry of Low Solubility Phosphate Colloids in Environmental Aquatic Mixtures.
NSF · Aug 2024 – Jul 2027
EAGER: GOALI: Explicating the gas-surface coupled reaction in oxidative coupling of methane via reaction kinetics, operando spectroscopy, photoionization spectrometry
NSF · Jul 2023 – Jun 2027
Closest labs
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Tran Nguyen
University of California-Davis, CA·Chemistry·Early-career
Measure light-driven production of sulfate radicals in aqueous particles and bulk water, and how it depends on pH, particle liquid water content, ionic strength and interfacial surface area.
The school
Lehigh University: 13 labs on PI Pages, $62M a year on research, 99 research doctorates a year.
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