Catalyzing the Transformation of Waste Plastics into Value-Added Products

Scientific Achievement

Platinum nanoparticles on a perovskite support catalyze selective hydrogenolysis of carbon-carbon bonds in polyethylene under mild conditions.

ACS Central Science abstract image
Supported Pt nanoparticles on perovskite catalyst yields high-performance lubricants from plastic waste
Significance and Impact

Selective catalytic hydrogenolysis provides high-quality, value-added liquid products from polyethylene, enabling upcycling of an untapped feedstock.

Research Details

Catalytic hydrogenolysis occurs at 300 °C and 170 psi of H2 under solvent-free conditions, yielding narrow distributed high-liquid products from single-use polyethylene stream, with negligible amounts of light hydrocarbons derivates

Cube-on-cube epitaxy for Pt nanoparticles on the {100} facets of SrTiO3 provides significant nanoparticle-support interactions that minimize sintering under the reaction conditions
 
Excellent catalyst performance requires more favorable adsorption of polyethylene on Pt sites than on the SrTiO3 support, as evidenced by solid state NMR and computational analysis (DFT)
 
Electronic and geometric properties of Pt nanoparticles on SrTiO3 play key roles in suppressing the undesired over-hydrogenolysis to light hydrocarbons.
 

This work was supported as part of Catalysis for Upcycling Polymers (CUP) by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Division of Chemical Sciences, Geosciences, and Biosciences, Catalysis Science Program under Contract DE-AC-02-06CH11357 (Argonne National Laboratory) and DE-AC-02 07CH11358 (Ames Laboratory).

 
Celik, G.;  Kennedy, R. M.;  Hackler, R. A.;  Ferrandon, M.;  Tennakoon, A.;  Patnaik, S.;  LaPointe, A. M.;  Ammal, S. C.;  Heyden, A.;  Perras, F. A.;  Pruski, M.;  Scott, S. L.;  Poeppelmeier, K. R.;  Sadow, A. D.; Delferro, M., Upcycling Single-Use Polyethylene into High-Quality Liquid Products. ACS Cent. Sci. 2019, 5, 1795-1803. https://doi.org/10.1021/acscentsci.9b00722