Chemical and Biomedical Engineering

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Biography

Dr. Fan has led and worked on many projects in the areas of chemical production, clean energy generation and environmental protection, which have been supported by various domestic and international funding agencies such as NSF, DOE and EPA, USGS and USDA in the US, New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO) in Japan, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and industrial companies such as Siemens and Caterpillar. He has helped various chemical, environmental and energy companies to overcome their technical challenges. He has published over 175 refereed books, book chapters, and papers in different chemical and environmental engineering, energy, and chemistry journals. As an Associate Editor or Editorial Board Member or Advisory Board Member, he has been serving several international chemical and energy as well as environmental journals. He has been supporting and supervising a number of graduate students and postdocs as well as research scientists in his research areas.

Education

• Chinese Academy of Sciences Environmental (Eng.) Chemistry Ph.D., 1997

• Iowa State University Mechanical Engineering Ph.D., 2000

• Osaka University Chemical Engineering Ph.D., 2003

Research Interests

• Assimilation of various methods and processes including (homogenous, heterogeneous and photo as well as bio) catalysis and separation with sorption and membrane as well as chemical looping pathway for conversion of fossil and renewable resources into value-added chemicals/materials and clean fuels

• Synthesis of new functional materials including ionic liquids, organic frameworks, magnetic materials and catalysts with different methods including supercritical fluids, crystallization, chemical vapor deposition

• Understanding the reaction kinetics and mechanisms associated with generation of chemicals (including petrochemicals) and energy through various theoretical and experimental methods including computation chemistry

• Recovering value-added materials from coal and other mineral utilization-by-products and co-produced water in fossil energy industries; Water and wastewater treatment

• Bioresource production and conversion

• Carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS)

• Development of renewable energies

• Computations

• Life cycle assessments of material production and energy generation processes

 

Publications

He has published his research results in various refereed books, book chapters, and journal papers in different chemical and environmental engineering, energy, and chemistry journals such as Nature Communications. He is one of the global highly cited researchers: e.g. (in 2019), https://recognition.webofsciencegroup.com/awards/highly-cited/2019/. The statistics of his publications are given at:https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ocl_AloAAAAJ&hl=en.

Projects

As a PI or Co-PI, he has many projects in the areas of chemical and energy generation as well as environmental protection, which have been supported by domestic and international funding agencies such as NSF, DOE, EPA, USGS and USDA in the U.S., New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO) in Japan, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), and industrial companies such as Siemens and Caterpillar. He has helped various chemical, environmental and energy companies to overcome their technical challenges. His NSF projects in recent years are in the areas of solar catalytic chemical looping based biomass refinery, simultaneous and low-emission utilization of coal and biomass, and application of nanotechnologies in energy production and environmental protection. Moreover, his recent DOE projects cover the areas of mercury removal, CO₂ capture, rare earth extraction, carbon fuel cells, production of chemicals/fuels and hydrogen from ethane, catalytic production of near-zero-CH₄ syngas, and catalytic ethylene glycol synthesis.