Auf der Jagd nach dem aktiven Zentrum - Video
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Our project
TrackAct - Tracking the Active Site in Heterogeneous Catalysis for Emission Control
More than 95% of all chemical products have seen a catalyst during their production, hence, catalysis plays a tremendeous role, presently being a 3 trillion $ / year market of chemical industry. Heterogeneous catalysis is a substantial part of it, and the great importance of emission control for environmental and human health is obvious.
Despite this importance, still very little is understood about the mechanisms on a truly atomic scale which is necessary for better control of function on all length scales up to the macroscopic. Consequently, catalyst design has been more empirical than knowledge-driven up to now. More than 60% of the noble metals produced worldwide are used in catalysis. As noble metals are finite resources, there is an urgent need to reduce their content in catalysts to the effective minimum, the so-called active site. Structural changes under process conditions and their pronounced heterogeneity often pose a great challenge for knowledge-based design. New perspectives are evolving, e.g. in the preparation of defined metal clusters/particles, their characterization, and theoretical modeling, allowing to track and fundamentally understand the active sites in catalytic systems. This is the starting point of this interdisciplinary Collaborative Research Centre, where we aim at a holistic understanding by linking the different length scales and catalyst complexity levels. Our scale-bridging approach connects three areas: (A) size-selected clusters and defined nanoparticles, (B) porous catalysts with noble metal particles of defined size on support oxides with oriented surfaces and (C) hierarchically structured catalysts at the reactor level.
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The goal of TrackAct is to identify and track the nature of the active site, to design and manipulate them from bottom-up across the various length scales, and - on a long-term vision - predict and actively control them during operation.
TrackAct officially started on January 1st 2021, press release from DFG and KIT.
Auf der Jagd nach dem aktiven Zentrum - Video
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Katalyseforschung auf drei Skalenebenen - Video
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Katalyseforschung auf drei Skalenebenen - Video
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Asad Asadli won the Best Poster Award at the 58th international Annual Meeting of German Catalytic Scientists (Jahrestreffen Deutscher Katalytiker) in Weimar. The poster entitled "Development of Catalyst Bed Concepts for Induction Heating for Emission Control" presented a collaborative work of the new project C06N with the group of TrackAct Mercator Fellow Prof. Dr. Silvia Gross - Congratulations!
Prof. Barbara Lechner has been awarded the Ernst Haage Prize for her work on functional nanomaterials. This prestigious award, valued at 7,500 euros, is given annually by the Mülheim Max Planck Institutes to talented young researchers in chemistry. Prof. Lechner's research focuses on the dynamic restructuring of nanomaterials under realistic conditions using high-resolution scanning tunneling microscopes. Congratulations!
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The Best Paper Award of the TUM Catalysis Research Center was awarded to Johanna Reich for her publication "A Critical View on the Quantification of Model Catalyst Activity"! This award recognizes outstanding collaborative work by Catalysis Research Center doctoral candidates. In her laudatio, Prof. Lechner praised Johanna's cleverly designed experiments, and Johanna highlighted the importance of scaling lab results in her research on platinum-19 clusters on magnetite surfaces. Congratulations!
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On their quest for PFAS remediation in gas phase, Lott, Maurer and Beck seem to be inspired by the force and packed it into a front cover for Angwandte: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/anie.202506110
Learn about "the present menace" and the potential application of catalysts in their minireview (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/anie.202424718) "Roadmap to Catalytic Abatement of Gas Phase Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS)"
Congratulations to B02 and coworkers for their inspiring inside back cover on their study "Single-Step Synthesis of Dimethyl Ether from Syngas over Nanoparticle-Derived Bifunctional Pd/CeO2/Al2O3 Catalysts"! You can admire their work here https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/anie.202505854 and the original paper here https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/anie.202423273
The paper of our colleagues from B02, C02 and A04 explores a single-step synthesis of dimethyl ether (DME) from syngas using bifunctional Pd/CeO2/γ-Al2O3 catalysts. The innovative approach leverages palladium colloids dispersed in a nanoscale cerium oxide matrix, significantly enhancing CO conversion and DME yield compared to traditional two-step processes. Detailed spectroscopic and microscopic analyses reveal the formation of highly dispersed palladium clusters within the cerium oxide matrix, contributing to the superior catalytic performance and stability.
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