Born in Waukegan, Illinois, Schmidt received a Bachelor of Science degree in
chemistry in 1960 from
Wheaton College in
Wheaton, Illinois. From 1960 to 1964, he attended the
University of Chicago, where he received a Ph.D. degree in
physical chemistry and was awarded a
National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship. Among many research endeavors, his thesis on alkali metal adsorption was supervised by Robert Gomer. In 1965, he completed a postdoctoral year at the
University of Chicago.
Research at Minnesota In 1965, he joined the
chemical engineering department at the
University of Minnesota as an assistant professor in the department of chemical engineering and materials science. Schmidt's research focused on various aspects of the chemistry and engineering of chemical reactions on solid surfaces. Reaction systems of recent interest are
catalytic combustion processes to produce products such as
syngas,
olefins, and
oxygenates by partial
oxidation,
NOx removal, and incineration by total oxidation. One topic of his research is the characterization of adsorption and reactions on well-defined single-crystal surfaces. A second research topic is steady-state and transient reaction kinetics under conditions from ultrahigh
vacuum to atmospheric pressure. Schmidt also researched catalytic reaction engineering, in which detailed models of reactors are constructed to simulate industrial reactor performance, with particular emphasis on chemical synthesis and on catalytic combustion.
Millisecond reactors Schmidt's research since the early 1990s has focused on the catalytic partial oxidation of alkanes (particularly methane) and oxygenates in continuous flow fixed bed supported
catalyst reactors. In 2004, Schmidt and his graduate students demonstrated that biomass-derived
ethanol could be converted to molecular
hydrogen for
fuel cell at greater than 100% selectivity. The significant potential of this discovery has been well-described: There is, however, a better way of storing the hydrogen needed for fuel cells: in ethanol, each molecule of which bundles six hydrogen atoms, two carbon atoms, and one oxygen atom into a package far more compact than gaseous hydrogen. Until recently, no one could figure out how to unbundle the ethanol molecules in an energy-efficient way. But Lanny Schmidt, a chemical engineer at the University of Minnesota, may now have found a silver bullet. He has developed a glass tube containing a series of metal plates about the size of a Bic lighter. Made out of the exotic metals rhodium and cerium, these plates can suck the hydrogen out of ethanol and feed it into a fuel cell. (Ironically, Schmidt had been looking for a catalyst that would strip hydrogen from plain old gasoline, but the ethanol turned out to work even better.)" — Sam Jaffe,
Washington Monthly The discovery has been referenced over 200 times, and it led to Schmidt being listed among the Scientific American top 50 researchers of 2004. == Academic accomplishments ==