Gina Han

Gina Han is a graduate student in mechanical engineering establishing scalable manufacturing techniques for copper-zeolite catalysts capable of abating low-level methane emissions. Methane’s warming effect vastly exceeds carbon dioxide, yet most anthropogenic methane is emitted at low concentrations where existing abatement solutions are expensive. Copper-zeolite catalysts address this challenge, but their deployment requires transforming loose powder into structured, high-performance forms suitable for industrial reactors. Gina has developed extrusion methods and pioneered binder jet additive manufacturing approaches for these catalysts. A critical enabling step is spray drying, which creates flowable powder granules needed for additive manufacturing. As a MathWorks Fellow, Gina will advance her MATLAB-based spray drying model to optimize process parameters through parametric studies and automated tuning. She will use the Optimization Toolbox to identify parameter sets that balance atomizer droplet size with thermodynamic drying requirements. Her work will also leverage the Statistics and Machine Learning Toolbox to uncover correlations between manufacturing parameters and catalyst performance. Her research lays the groundwork for manufacturing pathways that support the practical deployment of catalysts in large-scale methane abatement systems.