Research area:

Crystal Engineering and Supramolecular Chemistry

Host Organisation & country:

Midlands State University, Zimbabwe

Summary

Carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuel to produce energy is causing the greatest environmental concerns such as climate change and global warming in most African countries. Dr Mehlana’s research seeks to use enzymes housed in porous materials to capture and repurpose carbon dioxide emitted from power plants to produce methanol. Apart from the clear environmental and health advantages to be realized, there are economic benefits promised because methanol is a clean burning fuel suited to the infrastructure currently available to emerging economies.

Grantee Description

Dr Gift Mehlana is a Lecturer in the Department of Chemical Sciences at Midlands State University in Zimbabwe. He obtained his PhD at the University of Cape Town in South Africa in 2014.

His doctoral work focused on developing new porous material for chemical sensing. Dr Mehlana is the President of the Zimbabwe Chemical Society and Secretary of the African Crystallographic Association whose aim is to promote science and improve lives of the Africans through crystallography. Dr Mehlana’s research will focus on developing new materials for applications in catalysis, sensing and drug delivery.

Project: Water stable porous Metal Organic Frameworks as host materials for biological catalysts in carbon dioxide conversion to methanol

The methanol economy is vital to addressing growing global needs for improved energy  storage whilst reducing carbon emissions. Research into utilizing carbon dioxide to produce methanol under heterogeneous conditions has focussed on Cu/ZnO/Al2O3 composite catalysts. These use high-temperatures around 200 to 320 °C and pressures of 5 to 10 MPa, making catalyst structure difficult to control. Natural enzymatic processes which have undergone years of evolution can be exploited to produce methanol from carbon dioxide. This research seeks to use natural enzymes confined in a controlled chemical environment to convert CO2 captured by metal-organic frameworks into methanol. While enzymes are prone to changes in pH, temperature which limits their application in industrial processes, metal-organic frameworks provide a platform which prevents the enzymes from unfolding making them highly active and applicable for industrial applications under harsh environments.