NSF Award
2203881
With support from the Environmental Chemical Sciences Program in the Division of Chemistry at NSF, Christoph Aeppli at the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences will investigate the mechanism of sunlight-mediated transformation of oil hydrocarbons. This is relevant since photooxidation affects the fate of oil after marine spills, thereby fundamentally altering the properties, composition, and environmental fate of oil residues. This project will improve the mechanistic understanding of oil photochemistry by conducting a series of laboratory irradiation experiments. The knowledge and data expected from this project will improve oil spill risk and damage assessment. This project will also train a postdoctoral researcher and undergraduate students. Furthermore, results and methods from this project will be implemented in undergraduate coursework, and outcomes of this project will be communicated to the broader community through outreach programs.<br/><br/>To elucidate the relevant pathway for the degradation of saturated compounds is challenging in the complex mixture of oil with multiple co-occurring competing pathways. This project will use a step-wise approach with systems that have three levels of complexity. First, basic mechanist questions will first be addressed using a model oil consisting of a well-defined mixture of hydrocarbons. Second, various photochemical pathways will be systematically tested on these model compounds using sensitizers and quenchers naturally occurring in petroleum. Lastly, the gained knowledge will then be applied to the complex processes occurring in the complex mixture of petroleum, with the aim to construct a general conceptual mechanism of relevant oil photodegradation processes of the various saturated and aromatic hydrocarbons in oil. This project will employ an innovative method based on two-dimensional gas chromatography for the comprehensive quantification of oil degradation and will develop quantitative methods to measure the formation of oil photoproducts.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
