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CEMS > About > Faculty > Aditya Bhan

Aditya Bhan

Aditya Bhan

Information

Assistant Professor

Phone: 612-626-3981
Email: abhan@umn.edu


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Degrees

  • B.Tech. Chemical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, 2000
  • Ph.D., Chemical Engineering, Purdue University, 2005

Awards

  • US Department of Energy Early Career Award, 2012
  • NSF CAREER Award, 2011
  • McKnight Land Grant Assistant Professor, 2011-2013
  • College of Science and Engineering Outstanding Teacher Award, 2011
  • 3M Non-tenured Faculty Award, 2011-2013

Research Areas

Catalytic science will play a critical role in developing alternative energy sources and new conversion technologies for the 21st century. Our goal is to develop catalytic technologies that solve a key piece of this challenge by efficiently controlling hydrocarbon-based reaction pathways important in energy conversion and use, chemical synthesis, and environmental control. With these goals in mind our research focuses on developing new catalytic conversion technologies for renewable biomass-derived feedstocks and activation of light alkanes that are major constituents of natural gas.

The functional characterization of reactivity is accomplished by isotopic tracer and transient studies, chemical transient methods, and steady-state kinetic measurements to determine the evolution of surface species and reaction intermediates prevalent under reaction conditions. These kinetics and mechanistic studies are complemented by general structural and chemical characterization studies using X-ray diffraction, electron microscopy, porosity measurements, thermal analysis techniques and infrared and NMR spectroscopies. In intimate collaboration with these experimental studies, computational studies using Density Functional Theory (DFT) are done to examine molecule-surface interactions and chemical rearrangements relevant for these chemistries.

Our integrated experimental/ theoretical approach lies at the crossroads of materials synthesis, computational catalysis and catalytic chemistry and aims to advance our ability to understand, design and control chemical transformations using catalysis.

Selected Publications

  • Samia Ilias; Rachit Khare; Andre Malek; Aditya Bhan; “A descriptor for the relative propagation of the aromatic- and olefin-based cycles in methanol-to-hydrocarbons conversion on HZSM-5.” Journal of Catalysis 303 (2013) 135.
  • Joseph DeWilde; Hsu Chiang; Daniel A. Hickman; Christopher Ho; Aditya Bhan; “Kinetics and mechanism of ethanol dehydration on gamma-Al2O3: The critical role of dimer inhibition.” ACS Catalysis 3 (2013) 798-807.
  • Samuel D. Blass; Aditya Bhan; Lanny D. Schmidt; “Hydroconversion of liquid hydrocarbons in a staged autothermal reactor.” Applied Catalysis A: General 451 (2013) 153-159.
  • Samia Ilias; Aditya Bhan; “The mechanism of the catalytic conversion of methanol-to-hydrocarbons.” ACS Catalysis 3 (2013) 18-31.
  • Xueyi Zhang; Dongxia Liu; Shunsuke Asahina; Katie Cychosz; Kumar Varoon; Yasser Al Wahedi; Aditya Bhan; Saleh Al Hashimi; Osamu Terasaki; Matthias Thommes; Michael Tsapatsis; “Direct synthesis of a self-pillared single unit cell zeolite.” Science 336 (2012) 1684-1687.
  • Mark N. Mazar; Saleh Al Hashimi; Aditya Bhan; Matteo Cococcioni; “The methylation of ethene by surface methoxides: A periodic PBE+D study across zeolites.” Journal of Physical Chemistry C 116 (2012) 19385-19395.
  • Srinivas Rangarajan; Aditya Bhan; Prodromos Daoutidis; “Language-oriented rule-based reaction network generation and analysis: Description of RING.” Computers & Chemical Engineering 45 (2012) 114-123
  • Ian M. Hill; Yong Sam Ng; Aditya Bhan; “Kinetics of butene methylation reactions on zeolites” ACS Catalysis 2 (2012) 1742-1748.
  • Samia Ilias; Aditya Bhan; “Tuning the selectivity of methanol-to-hydrocarbons conversion over H-ZSM-5 by co-processing olefins or aromatic compounds.” Journal of Catalysis 290 (2012) 186-192.
  • Jeremy Bedard; Hsu Chiang; Aditya Bhan; “Kinetics and mechanism of acetic acid esterification on zeolites.” Journal of Catalysis 290 (2012) 210-219.
  • Elizabeth E. Mallon; Ian J. Babineau; Joshua Kranz; Yasmine Guefrachi; J. Ilja Siepmann; Aditya Bhan; Michael Tsapatsis; “Correlations for adsorption of oxygenates onto zeolites from aqueous solutions.” Journal of Physical Chemistry B 115 (2011) 11431-11438.