Presenter: Nicholas Rinehart
Faculty Mentor: Dave Tyler, Justin Barry
Presentation Type: Oral
Primary Research Area: Science
Major: Chemistry
Funding Source: Presidential Undergraduate Research Scholarship, UROP, 5000; SAACS Scholarship, SAACS, 500
Natural gas provided 28% of total energy consumption during 2014 in the United States. Nearly 20% of domestic natural gas wells are contaminated with nitrogen gas, making them unsuitable for use in natural gas burning equipment. Current methods of purification have a large cost, so they are often infeasible. A more feasible purification method is necessary to reduce the cost of purifying contaminated natural gas reserves and dependence on expensive imported natural gas. The Tyler Lab has demonstrated that a certain type of molecule called a coordination complex, which in this case contains phosphine ligands and a central iron atom, can serve as a nitrogen gas sorbent. Since the previous coordination complex bound nitrogen, but degraded too quickly to be applied in industry, current work is focused on creating a longer lived version of this molecule by redesigning the ligands bound to the central iron atom. Progress on the synthesis of this new coordination complex will be presented.