Enabling Technologies for Industrial Electrochemical Synthesis

Principal Investigator: Marcel Schreier, assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering

Co-Principal Investigators:

Styliana Avraamidou, assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering

Shannon Stahl, professor of chemical sciences

Daniel Weix, professor of chemistry

Zachary Wickens, assistant professor of chemistry

The United States has long been a global leader in chemical synthesis and pharmaceutical development, with the National Academies reporting that about 25% of U.S. GDP is from sectors reliant upon it. The use of electricity to promote reactions is poised to revolutionize chemical manufacturing by reducing costs and its environmental footprint. On the laboratory scale, these methods work well but we currently lack insight into the dynamics occurring at electrochemical interfaces, as well as the role of mass transport that is required to implement them at an industrial scale.

The University of Wisconsin–Madison has faculty with leading expertise in the key domains of electrochemistry, chemical engineering, process systems engineering, organic synthesis, and catalysis. This project will unite these faculty to pursue collaborative efforts to understand the bottlenecks in organic electrosynthesis and develop a generalizable framework for scaling organic electrosynthesis reactions, thereby establishing UW–Madison as a center of excellence in electrochemical synthesis.