Eric Detsi, Stephenson Term Assistant Professor in materials science and engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, has received the National Science Foundation’s CAREER Award. The CAREER Award is given to early-career faculty researchers who demonstrate the potential to be role models for research and education and are committed to outreach and public engagement.

Dr. Detsi’s award will fund research on understanding and overcoming the fundamental barriers to sustainable production of aluminum, the most abundant metal in the Earth’s crust, and second-most-used metal worldwide after iron. As a lightweight and flexible metal, aluminum is ubiquitous, found in products ranging from soda cans to aircraft parts. The grant will also fund an outreach initiative bringing this research to underrepresented K-12 students at the Pennsylvania School for the Deaf through interactive science kits on the life cycle of aluminum.

Aluminum occurs in its natural form as aluminum hydroxide, abundant in Earth’s crust as bauxite ore. Converting that ore to aluminum, however, requires a 130-year-old, energy-intensive industrial process. High temperatures are used to convert the aluminum hydroxide into aluminum oxide, also known as alumina, and then melt it to a point where pure aluminum can be extracted through electrolysis, which requires a significant amount of electricity. On top of the intensive energy used in the form of heat and electricity, making 1 kg of aluminum produces 14 kg of carbon dioxide as by-product, equivalent to the CO2 released from burning about 1.5 gallons of gasoline.

Dr. Detsi aims to create a sustainable aluminum production process by directly converting aluminum hydroxide to aluminum at room temperature.

“Instead of using high-temperature electrolysis of molten alumina, aluminum hydroxide can be directly reduced to aluminum metal at room temperature through a process involving hydroxide ions and an aqueous electrolyte. However, metallic aluminum is highly reactive to water, making the use of an aqueous solution problematic,” Dr. Detsi said. “To overcome this challenge, we are working on developing a hybrid aqueous/non-aqueous electrochemical cell which can provide hydroxide ions while enabling aluminum to be made in a non-aqueous solution. The ultimate goal of this project is to achieve a direct aluminum hydroxide-to-aluminum conversion at room temperature, a process that not only avoids any direct carbon emissions, but also eliminates any energy waste in converting aluminum hydroxide to alumina and melting the alumina.”