David Joseph Couling
PhD Candidate

Mailing Address:  Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Chemical Engineering 66-263, 77 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA, 02139-4307 Office Phone: 617-452-3702 Fax: 617-324-0066 Email: dcouling@mit.edu

I grew up in Columbus, Ohio.  After I graduated from high school, I moved on to the University of Notre Dame in 2002.  I graduated from Notre Dame in 2006 with a degree in chemical engineering.  My research projects there involved the behavior of ionic liquids—organic salts that are liquid at room temperature.  During my junior year I worked on the computational side of the project using Quantitative Structure-Property Relationship modeling to attempt to predict the aquatic toxicities and thermal decomposition temperatures of different ionic liquids.  After my junior year I switched gears to experimental research: measuring the solubilities of gas mixtures in ionic liquids.  Specifically, I was investigating the enhancement effect the presence of carbon dioxide had on the solubility of oxygen in an ionic liquid solvent.

After coming to MIT in the Fall of 2006, I joined the Green Group and am now studying coal gasification systems in power generation.  My current research project involves developing regenerable sorbents to remove impurities commonly found in coal synthesis gas streams, such as mercury or hydrogen cyanide, at high temperatures.  These impurities are currently removed at temperatures as low as -40 ºC, and developing a method to remove them at temperatures closer to their process temperature could greatly improve the efficiency of the power generation process.  Although I have diverged from the phase equilibrium studies I did as an undergraduate, I will be keeping up the combination of computational and experimental research by both evaluating potential catalysts using first-principles chemistry methods, and then verifying my catalyst selections experimentally.