The development of fuel cells as clean-energy technologies is largely limited by the prohibitive cost of the noble-metal catalysts needed for catalyzing the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) in fuel cells. A fundamental understanding of catalyst design principle that links material structures to the catalytic activity can accelerate the search for highly active and abundant nonmetal catalysts to ...

We report the synthesis of a highly loaded and thermally stable Cu-containing mesoporous silica, which was developed by making use of poly(acrylic acid) (Pac) assembled with surfactant (C(16)TAB), as template. On this backbone, TEOS and Cu(II) hydrolysis takes place leading to the development of the final mesostructure. Poly(acrylic acid) is used not only as a micelle structural component but a...

The thesis of this review is that new catalytic concepts may be derived or discovered from new materials or newly recognized material properties. This thesis is demonstrated by a brief discussion of four materials, and the associated concepts, which enjoyed a certain fashion in the Journal of Catalysis and became themes of the author’s research. The four materials (or material properties) descr...

Core–shell Au NPs@MOF-808 architecture has been synthesized using sustainable conditions. NPs capping agent removal optimized to boost the catalytic efficiency of composite material.

Interfacial Schottky barriers can impact the catalytic function of Pt on TiO2. Since electronic structure is characteristic each material, it may be advantageous to tailor interfacial Sc...

Approach • Complete reverse kinetics and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) modeling to optimize reactor geometry for forward reactions • Measure forward kinetics in quartz & Inconel reactors to determine reactor wall catalysis • Measure forward kinetics in reactor packed with membrane material to determine catalytic activity • Measure membrane H2 permeability in presence of clean syngas compon...

An enantioconvergent catalytic process has the potential to convert a racemic starting material to a single highly enantioenriched product with a maximum yield of 100%. Three mechanistically distinct approaches to effecting enantioconvergent catalysis are identified, and recent examples of each are highlighted. These processes are compared to related, non-enantioconvergent methods.

Iron tetrasulfophthalocyanine (FePcS) has been irreversibly inserted into nanocages of the metal organic framework MIL-101 to give a hybrid material FePcS/MIL-101 which demonstrated a superior catalytic performance in the selective oxidation of aromatic substrates with (t)BuOOH than homogeneous FePcS.

In this study of catalytic microfluidic reactors we show that, when optimally structured, these reactors share underlying scaling properties. The scaling is predicted theoretically and verified numerically. Furthermore, we show how to increase the reaction rate significantly by distributing the active porous material within the reactor using a high-level implementation of topology optimization.