Grant: Research Tools and Instruments - Category 1 (<$150,000)

Plastic is today an integral part of our lifestyle. In spite of the concern for the negative environmental impact and which encourage reduction of waste and proper disposal, there are important applications and for which polyethylene and polypropylene plastics remain irreplaceable (automotive, medical, industrial,etc.). In fact this is one of the largest volume business of the world. 1-hexene and 1-octene are critical additives to control the rheology of polymeric material. The demand for these chemicals is so high that the production from oil industry cannot satisfy the demand. Hence there is need for catalytic process to produce them from ethylene via a thermodynamically allowed catalytic process. Synthesizing new catalysts and understanding their mechanism of action is the main core of our research. This requires of course screening of the catalysts produced by testing the output of the catalytic runs. The expense proposed in this project for a GC-MS is aimed at assisting our endeavor.