The first day of my Princetern­ship began with a short meet­ing with the pres­i­dent of Exelus, who gave us a brief overview of the com­pany and the energy indus­try. His short talk really helped put into per­spec­tive the impor­tance of research in clean energy tech­nolo­gies and fur­ther solid­i­fied my desire to enter into the research sec­tor of the energy indus­try. Fol­low­ing the talk, I was eager to begin observ­ing all the var­i­ous exper­i­ments, and my host Belinda Slak­man ‘10 did not dis­ap­point. After a quick tour through the facil­ity and cur­sory intro­duc­tions with many of the other employ­ees, Belinda began show­ing me and Alex, my fel­low intern, the exper­i­ments that she would be run­ning that day. We looked at two dif­fer­ent reac­tors, one that pro­duced the com­pound styrene, which is used to pro­duce a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent poly­mers, and one that pro­duced the com­pound ethyl ben­zene, which is a pre­cur­sor to the com­pound styrene. Belinda and fel­low Prince­ton grad­u­ate, Nizette, showed us how to oper­ate the reac­tors and take and ana­lyze gas and liq­uid sam­ples of the prod­ucts using gas chro­matographs. We also learned how to assem­ble the core of the reac­tor. The rest of the day was spent imput­ing and ana­lyz­ing data using dif­fer­en­tial rate laws while tak­ing hourly sam­ples from the reactors.

On the sec­ond day, we started by set­ting up two dif­fer­ent reac­tors for exper­i­ments. We then learned how to pre­pare the zeo­lite cat­a­lyst that was used for the exper­i­ments, which required hourly washes of a potas­sium hydrox­ide base. In between wait­ing for the cat­a­lyst and tak­ing sam­ples from the reac­tors, Alex and I talked with a few of the other employ­ees about their projects. One of the only chemists at the com­pany described how her project pro­poses to take the short hydro­car­bons formed from bio­mass and alky­late them to form longer hydro­car­bons that can be used as gaso­line, diesel, and jet fuel. Another researcher also employs bio­mass in her project. Her goal was to use a non-biological, non-gasification method to break down any type of bio­mass into glu­cose before gen­er­at­ing a mix­ture of var­i­ous alco­hols. The idea was to avoid the time con­sum­ing enzy­matic route and the high energy costs of gasi­fi­ca­tion. We also wres­tled with new exper­i­ments that Belinda was run­ning, which required propy­lene to become a liq­uid at 200° C. After con­sult­ing Antoine’s law, we real­ized the exper­i­men­tal route would be impos­si­ble because propy­lene was above its crit­i­cal tem­per­a­ture at 200° C and thus can­not be com­pressed into a liq­uid (sim­i­lar to how nitro­gen can­not be com­pressed into a liq­uid unless it is at a very low temperature).

Vin­cent, Belinda Slak­man, and fel­low Princetern Alexandra

The third day was much less hec­tic, mainly because it was a Fri­day. Alex and I spent part of the day prepar­ing a short pre­sen­ta­tion to show what we learned. We did find out about another excit­ing exper­i­ment, which related to pho­to­catal­y­sis. The main goal, or as one of the head of researchers described one of the “holy grails” of engi­neer­ing, was to attempt to reduce car­bon diox­ide into an alco­hol which can be burned as fuel. The idea was fas­ci­nat­ing to me, but the tech­nol­ogy was still in its infancy and was not fully devel­oped yet. How­ever, it was excit­ing to see how many peo­ple were work­ing on so many dif­fer­ent cut­ting edge tech­nolo­gies. This Princetern­ship was an expe­ri­ence that I am sure will ben­e­fit me greatly in the future when I’m decid­ing upon my career.