An Ames Lab scientist is working to create a more efficient chemical manufacturing technique, which may lower the cost of many products people use in their daily lives.Andreja Bakac, scientist at the Ames Laboratory, has been working on the project for about four years. “If you have a way to make much more cheaply the starting chemicals for [the chemical manufacturing process], you have certainly saved many industries a lot of money,” she said.One of the reactions for producing these starting chemicals is the benzene-to-phenol reaction, Bakac said. “If we could develop this process to oxidize benzene to phenol, this would be an extremely important achievement because phenol is a starting chemical for many other reactions,” she said. “It’s used to make … plastics, dyes and resins.”The secret to making starting chemicals more efficiently is using light instead of heat to activate chemicals called hydrocarbons, she said. The process is called oxidation.”We use [hydrocarbons] today mainly to burn them,” Bakac said. “Gasolines and octanes are your typical hydrocarbons.”Once the hydrocarbon is partially oxidized, it becomes more reactive and is useful as a starting material in chemical industry, she said.Many oxidants also pose problems of waste disposal and pollution, but Bakac said her method, which uses air and light to create the reaction, is “the cleanest and greenest that it gets.” This technique, Bakac said, would greatly reduce waste in the production of chemicals.The reaction also needs uranium for a catalyst, to speed up the oxidation reaction, she said. Light excites the uranium, making the hydrocarbons react with the air in the oxidation reaction. “[Uranium] does not get used in the reaction,” Bakac said. “It just gets recycled over and over and over.” The uranium currently is dissolved in a solution during the reaction, and Bakac said her next project is to use solid uranium in this new process of oxidation. If solid uranium is used, she said, then “everything else is liquid, so they can be separated at the end [of the oxidation process].”Iver Anderson, adjunct professor of materials science and engineering, said Bakac’s work is a mixture of old and new methods.”It’s a case of a good scientist recalling a traditional technique in a completely different area and then applying it to make a new advance,” he said.Anderson, who reviewed Bakac’s work as part of an internal laboratory process, said her work is “ground-breaking.””It’s sort of in the category of a quantum leap in efficiency,” he said.