Feb­ru­ary 2019

Bingjun Xu, Uni­ver­si­ty of Delaware

Abstract: Het­ero­ge­neous catal­y­sis is one of the pil­lars of the ener­gy and
chem­i­cal indus­tries, and a cen­tral sci­ence in dri­ving the
accel­er­at­ing tran­si­tion to a car­bon neu­tral future.
Under­stand­ing cat­alyt­ic process­es medi­at­ed by sol­id sur­faces
on the mol­e­c­u­lar lev­el holds the key to cat­a­lyst design, but is
chal­leng­ing due to the com­plex­i­ty of the local envi­ron­ment in
which chem­i­cal trans­for­ma­tions occur. In this lec­ture,
encap­su­la­tion of met­al nanopar­ti­cles in zeo­lite crys­tals as an
effec­tive cat­a­lyst archi­tec­ture to medi­ate selec­tive tan­dem
upgrad­ing of bio­mass derived feed­stocks is dis­cussed in the
con­text of two case stud­ies. The sequence to which sub­strates
are exposed to dif­fer­ent active sites and the dis­tri­b­u­tion of
met­al and acid sites in zeo­lite crys­tals are shown to play deci­sive roles in deter­min­ing selec­tiv­i­ty
and sta­bil­i­ty of cat­a­lysts.