Ph.D. Candidate (2009)

Department of Chemical Engineering
Doherty Hall Room B207
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
412-268-3892 (lab)
412-268-4531 (office)
412-268-7139 (fax)

Naturally Chiral Mineral Surfaces as Media for Enantiospecific Adsorption

Today's production of single-enantiomer compounds is one of the the fastest growing fields in the chemical industry. Carnegie Mellon is very active in the research and development of novel chiral materials and technologies. Chiral surfaces capable of enantioselectivity can be produced by cleaving single crystals of metals with achiral bulk cubic lattice structure along certain high Miller index planes to expose the naturally chiral kinked surfaces. In particular, the enantiospecific differences have been found in the adsorption properties of (R)-3-methylcyclohexanone on the chiral Cu(643) and Cu(653) surfaces. In this research we study an entirely different class of chiral materials - inorganic crystalline minerals, whose intrinsic chiral properties give them a great potential to be used as enantioselective adsorbents, catalysts, sensors, and more. Currently we are studying the desorption kinetics of (R)- and (S)-2-butanol preadsorbed on a chiral surface of right-handed single crystal low-quartz with (0001) face orientation using the temperature-programmed desorption (TPD) technique. The experiments have revealed that 2-butanol chemisorbs in the molecular form and that different adsorbed forms of this molecule exist on the quartz surface. The enantiospecific differences have been also detected, as some adsorbed forms desorb at slightly different temperatures when compared between the (R)- and (S)- enantiomers. The future work will explore the enantiospecificity of other chiral surfaces of quartz, i.e. (1 0 -1 0) and (0 1 -1 0), and the set of chiral compounds will be expanded to inlcude propylene oxide, 3-methyl-cyclohexanone and amino acids.

Coming Soon.

Probing Ceria Surface Adsorption Sites via Reaction with Molecular Oxygen -- View presentation