Title: Challenges in the chemical conversion of agriculture and forest wastes, and strategies to face them

Speaker: Prof.  Changwei.Hu professor of Sichuan University

Time: 4:00 PM on June 15, 2018 (Friday)

Venue: E211 meeting room, Building of the College of science

Abstract

This talk will address firstly the challenges in the chemical conversion of agriculture and forest wastes, including the necessity of converting these wastes to value-added chemicals, and energy and functional materials; the muti-scale complexity of these conversion; complex multiphase system involved; the formation of oligomers and the further conversion of oligomers; high O content compared to fossil resources; etc. Three aspects, high selectivity of target product, the utilization of raw materials to their fullest, taking advantage of the naturally formed diverse substructures, should be highly considered. The main chemical reactions involved in these conversion, including depolymerization, deoxygenation, inhibition of polymerization and/or the use of polymerization, new reactions waiting for, etc. Then, several propositions to overcome these challenges, general strategies for these conversion, the depolymerization via solvent dissolution, simplify the complexity via fractional routes, new catalyst and process to obtain high yield and selectivity to target product, utilize the "two complexities”, will be given.