Maohong Fan

Department of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering

Carrell Endowed Chair and SER Professor

Contact Information

(307) 766-5633mfan@uwyo.edu

Engineering Building 4048

Image of Maohong Fan

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 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.

As a PI or Co-PI, he has many projects in the areas of chemical and energy generation as well as environmental protection. 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. 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.

Education

  • Ph.D., Chinese Academy of Sciences, Environmental (Eng.) Chemistry, 1997
  • Ph.D., Iowa State University, Mechanical Engineering, 2000
  • Ph.D., Osaka University, Chemical Engineering, 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 cconversion 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 and chemical vapor deposition.
  • Understanding the reaction kinetics and mechanisms associated with generation of chemicals (incluiding 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

Select Publications

  • He, Xin, Yangyan Gao, Yunlei Shi, Xiaowen Zhange, Zhiwu Liang, Riguang Zhang, Xingfei Song et al. "[EMmim][NTf2]—a novel ionic liquid (IL) in catalytic CO2 capture and ILs' applications." Advanced Science 10, no. 3 (2023): 2205352.
  • Richard, Anthony R., and Maohong Fan. "Low-pressure hydrogenation of CO2 to CH3OH using Ni-In-Al/SiO2 catalyst synthesized via a phyllosilicate precursor." ACS Catalysis 7, no. 9 (2017): 5679-5692.
  • Lai, Qinghua, Sam Toan, Mohammed A. Assiri, Huaigang Cheng, Armistead G. Russell, Hertanto Adidharma, Maciej Radosz, and Maohong Fan. "Catalyst-TiO(OH)2 could drastically reduce the energy consumption of CO2 capture." Nature communications 9, no. 1 (2018): 2672.
  • Ye, R.P., Ding, J., Gong, W., Argyle, M.D., Zhong, Q., Wang, Y., Russell, C.K., Xu, Z., Russell, A.G., Li, Q., Fan, M., Yao, Y., CO2 hydrogenation to high-value products via heterogeneous catalysis, Nature Communications, 10(1), 5698, 2019.
  • Dutcher, Bryce, Maohong Fan, Brian Leonard, M. Darby Dyar, Jinke Tang, Elly A. Speicher, Pan Liu, and Yulong Zhang. "Use of Nanoporous FeOOH as a Catalytic Support for NaHCO3 Decomposition Aimed at Reduction of Energy Requirement of Na2CO3/NaHCO3 Based CO2 Separation Technology." Journal of Physical Chemistry C 115, no. 31 (2011): 15532-15544.