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Catalysis is an essential technology for the production of both bulk and fine chemicals, materials,
and fuels, as well as for combustion and pollution control devices. Hence, catalysis is expected to
play a decisive role in confronting environmental and societal grand challenges in the next decade,
including depletion of fossil fuels and mitigating greenhouse gases emissions. However, the
efficiency of existing catalytic technologies is still unable to meet demand. Such slow growth in
catalysis-based technologies can be attributed to the lack of mechanistic/fundamental
understanding of the reactions involved, owing to the fact that the experimental detection of shortlived
reactive intermediates is notoriously difficult to achieve. The importance of mechanistic
understanding in heterogeneous catalysis cannot be ignored, as such information is instrumental
in developing superior catalysts, maximizing product yields, reducing costs, and minimizing waste
to increase economic value. As a matter of fact, currently, ~90% products of the chemical industry
are made in catalytic processes. It has also been estimated that >35% of the planetary GDP
depends on catalytic processes. Therefore, the rational design of catalysts to develop new chemical
processes, through the fundamental understanding of reaction mechanisms (i.e., pieces of the
puzzle), is of vital importance to accelerate our effort to address current societal grand challenges.
In this presentation, a few such outcomes of mechanism-driven development of new
(mostly heterogeneous) catalytic technologies will be discussed. This approach is primarily
depending on the ‘in-situ/operando’ spectroscopy to investigate the mechanism of reaction as well
as to establish structure-property-performance relationships of any catalytic material, through
simultaneous in-situ spectroscopic characterization of catalysts along with the measurement of its
catalytic activity/selectivity under real-time working conditions. Suitability of these new catalytic
systems with respect to industrial applications along with its present status will also be
demonstrated.
Representative examples:
[1] Chowdhury & Beller et al., Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2014, 53, 6477.
[2] Chowdhury & Weckhuysen et al., Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2016, 55, 15840; Nat. Catal. 2018, 1,
23-31; Nat. Chem. 2018, In Press.
[3] Chowdhury & Gascon et al., Nat. Catal. 2018, 1, 398; Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2018, DOI:
10.1002/anie.201808480. |