A University of Utah research team led by Chuancheng Duan, associate professor of chemical engineering in the John and Marcia Price College of Engineering, has received a new grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop a fundamentally different way of manufacturing nitric acid, one of the world’s most important industrial chemicals.
The multi-phase DARPA program represents an up-to $4.76 million investment in the research. The project represents a major expansion of Duan’s research in solid-oxide electrochemistry, developing advanced electrochemical materials and devices for highly efficient energy conversion. The new DARPA program, which aims to develop a device called SO-NACE (Solid Oxide Nitric Acid Catalytic Electroreactor), takes the underlying scientific capabilities developed through that work in a new direction: using electrochemistry not only to generate electricity, but also to manufacture critical chemicals.
Today, nitric acid is primarily produced through factory-sized, centralized industrial processes. SO-NACE would be dramatically different: a compact and modular technology that could ultimately manufacture concentrated nitric acid directly from air, water and electricity. The tabletop device — about the size of a large printer — would enable production closer to where the chemical is needed. The award identifies potential benefits for national security as well as broader commercial applications in distributed chemical manufacturing.
“The exciting part of this project is not simply making an existing chemical process smaller,” Duan said. “We are trying to rethink the chemistry itself. Our goal is to use electrochemistry to precisely control how oxygen and nitrogen interact, allowing us to direct the reaction toward the chemical we want much more efficiently.”
That ability to control the chemistry rather than simply provide energy to drive it is the central breakthrough behind the project. Nitrogen makes up most of the air around us, but converting it into useful chemicals is a persistent challenge because the nitrogen molecule is extremely stable. Current approaches to direct nitrogen conversion can suffer from low production rates and efficiency or require energy-intensive, plasma-based processes and substantial supporting equipment.
The approach pursued by Duan’s team instead uses high-temperature solid-oxide electrochemistry to control the supply and behavior of reactive oxygen during nitrogen conversion.
“What makes our approach different is the level of control we can introduce into the reaction,” Duan said. “We can design the catalytic material and independently control the oxygen that reaches the reaction environment. Rather than allowing nitrogen and oxygen to react under broadly defined conditions, we want to engineer the reaction at the material level.”
The project will also support the team’s discovery of new catalytic materials. The research combines experimental catalyst development with computational modeling to identify the fundamental material properties that favor nitrogen oxidation while suppressing competing reactions. Those relationships can then guide the design of subsequent materials rather than relying primarily on trial-and-error screening.
The project will build on years of Price Engineering research in solid-oxide electrochemical materials, high-temperature catalysis and advanced characterization. Duan’s team will first identify promising materials and establish the scientific mechanisms responsible for their performance before advancing toward larger integrated electrochemical systems. The research plan ultimately aims to translate laboratory discoveries into a compact, scalable technology capable of producing nitric acid on demand.
The project also marks another step in the evolution of Duan’s research program at the U. His earlier work has focused extensively on solid oxide fuel cells and related electrochemical technologies that efficiently convert chemical fuels into electricity. The same fundamental understanding of how ions, electrons and molecules interact at high-temperature material interfaces is now being extended toward chemical manufacturing.
“This project shows that the science behind advanced energy technologies can have applications far beyond energy generation,” Duan said. “The same electrochemical principles that allow us to efficiently convert fuels into electricity can potentially give us entirely new ways to manufacture chemicals.”
If successful, the research could help establish a new model for distributed chemical manufacturing, in which important chemicals are produced using modular electrochemical systems powered by electricity rather than relying exclusively on large, centralized facilities and long supply chains.
“Ultimately, our goal is bigger than one chemical,” Duan said. “We want to demonstrate that electrochemistry can give us new control over difficult chemical reactions. If we can do that, it could open opportunities to rethink how a much broader range of chemicals are manufactured.”
The project is sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency under Cooperative Agreement HR0011-26-2-E037. The content of this information does not necessarily reflect the position or policy of the U.S. Government, and no official endorsement should be inferred.