Electrified Interfaces Research Website

Welcome to Dr. Ponnurangam lab’s website. Research in our group focuses on the following broader areas of chemical engineering

1. Green processes and reagents: Environmentally sustainable and economically viable approaches for mineral extraction from primary and secondary sources are critically needed for a transition to a sustainable greener economy. We develop new sorbents and flotation reagents that can selectively separate vanadium, and rare earth elements from a mixture of gangue cations using adsorption, ion exchange, and ion-flotation methods, and we are currently developing ion-exchange resins for lithium separation from formation waters.
2. Advanced electrochemical water treatment and soil remediation: Electrochemically-based methods for water desalination and recovery of valuable elements is one of the emerging technologies for replacing traditional energy- and material-intensive separation methods. We have developed metal-free recyclable electro-sorbents based on conducting polymers and carbon that are selective to heavy metals while rejecting alkali, alkaline earth metal ions as well as commonly present base transition metal ions.
3. Energy conversion and storage: Screening materials for electrodes and electrolytes as well as their interfacial assemblies is an essential part of systems development in energy conversion and energy storage technologies. In our group, we combine modeling and experimental approaches to identify high performance materials for hydrogen fuel cells and CO₂ electrolyzers, as well as Li-S batteries.  Molecular dynamics and density functional theory methods are used for establishing structure-property relationships for catalytic properties of metal oxides and metal sulfides, as well as for quantifying small molecules/ion transport properties within polymer-metal and polymer-polymer assemblies. We develop economically viable hybrid technologies for catalytic conversion of CO₂ to fuels.