Hello blog readers! I’m Hayder, one of the summer fellows in the UIowa Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio. I’m working on creating a website to educate people about a new fuel combustion process which is Chemical Looping Combustion (CLC). CLC is a promising method of natural gas combustion to produce energy. This process utilizes the lattice oxygen molecules of metal oxides to combust the natural gas, instead of air, which minimizes the formation of pollutant byproducts such as NO2, N2O, or NO, which form when the reaction occurs in air (e.g., N2 and O2). The CLC process is highly efficient with little to no side effects. Minimizing the formation of pollutant gases could help to solve the global warming issue!
I have been working on this project since Spring 2014 as my main research topic for a PhD in Chemical and Biochemical Engineering. This project is funded by the NSF. One of its objectives is to train the next generation of multidisciplinary scientists and engage with the public. While advances such as CLC for cleaner combustion create opportunities for better living through chemistry, they also mandate that we both train the next generation of multidisciplinary scientists and educate the public. Under this objective, we got involved with the Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio department to create a website to present some background information about pollution, the CLC process, and our research results in this field.
Thus, I have been involved with the Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio department to get their help in creating the website and creating animated figures that can explain the outcomes of our investigation. Currently, I am trying to create an animated figure that explains the reduction mechanism of cobalt oxide in the CLC process. The figure below demonstrate the reduction mechanism but without animation.