Special Webinar on Py-GCMS for Environmental Oil Pollutions/Residues
We are delighted to invite you to join webinar on Mar 23 2022, 9.30 PM to learn about new Py-GCMS Applications. Please see below for the details.
Seminar title: Thermal Slicing Ramped Pyrolysis GC/MS, a powerful technique to elucidate composition and structure of oil residues in environments.
Abstract: The Deepwater Horizon (DWH) oil spill is one of the world’s largest marine oil spills in history, releasing about 4.9 million barrels of crude oil to the northern Gulf of Mexico over 87 days from April 20 to July 15, 2010. Over the last decade or so, much novel knowledge has been gained in many research directions of oil spill sciences, such as numerical modeling of oil droplets in both micro- and macroscales, multi-omics and bioinformatics of oil-degrading microorganisms, and the biological and chemical weathering processes of oil in marine environments.
Among all the legacy knowledge gained from the DWH oil spill research, the key role of photooxidation in transforming petroleum hydrocarbons under Gulf of Mexico environmental conditions, to me, cannot be highlighted enough. For example, it is estimated that asphaltenes or tar balls on shorelines contained as much as 10% oxygen by mass, a magnitude that is unprecedented in oil spill research. A full understanding of the photooxidation, therefore, is important in terms of oil spill research, such as for predicting the fate of oil should another oil spill occur. However, it is extremely challenging to elucidate the processes of photooxidation, not only due to the complicated photooxidation itself but also the complex mixture of oil. In this seminar, I will talk about how my group has been using thermal slicing ramped pyrolysis GC/MS to elucidate chemical composition and structure of field and laboratory oil samples, and the novel insights we have gained from this technique.
Speaker Profile: Dr. Zhanfei Liu received both B.S. and M.S. from Xiamen University, China, and Ph.D. in Coastal Oceanography in 2006 from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He then spent 3 years at Old Dominion University as a Postdoctoral Research Associate. In 2009, he joined UTMSI and is currently an Associate Professor