materialsscienceandengineering:A needle in a haystack: Weeding out dead catalystCatalysts are impo
materialsscienceandengineering: A needle in a haystack: Weeding out dead catalystCatalysts are important additives that are used to increase the material and energy efficiency of chemical reactions and processes. Although catalysts operate in cycles that should restore their initial activity over and over again, they do deactivate over time. Researchers from Utrecht University and University of Twente have now developed a powerful analytical tool that marks dead catalyst particles for deletion, providing a technique to physically remove them from a stream of particles. They published their results on 9 December in Nature Catalysis.More efficientThe researchers explain: “Because the deactivation of catalyst particles is a heterogeneous process, picking out the dead catalyst particles from a large catalyst volume is like trying to find a bunch of needles in a haystack.” Weeding out deactivated particles means that only active catalyst material remains, thus ensuring cleaner and more efficient chemical reactions and processes.The study was a joint research project of Ph.D. candidates Anne-Eva Nieuwelink (Utrecht University) and Jeroen Vollenbroek (University of Twente), under supervision of Prof. Bert Weckhuysen (Utrecht University) and researchers from the MESA+ Institute at the University of Twente, including Prof. Mathieu Odijk and Prof. Albert van den Berg. The project is part of the NWO Gravitation Program MCEC.Read more. -- source link