Catalysts enhanced with atom scale observations

Insights into the reaction pathways and kinetics of catalytic reactions at the atomic scale is critical to designing catalysts for more energy-efficient and sustainable chemical production, particularly multimaterial catalysts that have ever-changing surface structures.

Now, and for the first time, researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), in collaboration with researchers from Stony Brook University, University of Pennsylvania, University of California, Los Angeles, Columbia University, and University of Florida, have an understanding of the evolving structures in a multimaterial catalyst.

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The research was done as part of the Integrated Mesoscale Architectures for Sustainable Catalysis (IMASC), an Energy Frontier Research Center funded by the US Department of Energy, headquartered at Harvard. The research is detailed in a paper published in Nature Communications.

“Our multipronged strategy combines reactivity measurements, machine learning-enabled spectroscopic analysis, and kinetic modelling to resolve a long-standing challenge in the field of catalysis - how do we understand the reactive structures in complex and dynamic alloy catalysts at the atomic level,” said Boris Kozinsky, the Thomas D. Cabot Associate Professor of Computational Materials Science at SEAS and co-corresponding author of the paper. “This research allows us to advance catalyst design beyond the trial-and-error approach.”