Rice engineers successfully transform carbon monoxide into acetic acid

Thanks to a couple of Rice University engineers, a roadmap for converting carbon monoxide into acetic acid has been discovered.

Chemical and biomolecular engineers Haotian Wang and Thomas Senftle in the Brown School of Engineering resolved previous issues that developed in the process of turning the gas into a liquid form. 

A university press release reported within 150 hours of continuous lab operation, an environmentally-friendly reactor produced a solution that was 2% acetic acid in water. The acid component was 98% pure which was better than what was previously produced. The effort involved using nanoscale cubes of copper as the primary catalyst along with a solid-state electrolyte.

Senftle and his team used computational models to refine the cubes form factor. It was found having more edge sites favored breaking the C-0 bonds that steer the products, the press release reported. The process developed by Wang and Senftle was a significant improvement over previous effort.

Acetic acid is most commonly known for giving vinegar its tang but has a number of additional uses that include antiseptic in medical applications, a solvent for ink, paint and coatings, in the production of vinyl acetate which is a precursor for white glue.

“We’re upgrading the product from a one-carbon chemical, the formic acid, to two-carbon, which is more challenging,” Wang said, the press release reported. “People traditionally produce acetic acid in liquid electrolytes, but they still have the issue of low performance as well as separating the product from the electrolyte.”

Next for the two engineers will be to improve upon the system’s stability and further reduce the amount of energy that is required for the process. As it stands, the project was referred to by Senftle was an example of how theory and experiment can mesh.  

“It’s a nice example of engineering on many levels, from integration of the components in a reactor all the way down to the mechanism at the atomistic level,” Sentfle said, the press release reported. “It fits with the themes of molecular nanotechnology, showing how we can scale it up to real-world devices.”