The Gene and Linda Voiland School of Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering department at Washington State University is pleased to invite you to our upcoming seminar on Monday, November 16, at 12:10 p.m. in Todd 311.
Mark Saeys (full professor) obtained his PhD from Ghent University in 2002. From 2003 to June 2014 he was a professor of chemical engineering at the National University of Singapore. Since July 2014 he is a professor at the Laboratory for Chemical Technology at Ghent University. During his PhD, he was a visiting scientist with Matt Neurock at the University of Virginia and with Bill Green at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. For his work on gas phase radical chemistry, he received the ExxonMobil Chemical Benelux Award in 2002 and the Richard A. Glenn Award in 2003. In Singapore, he was the Associate Director for academics in the Singapore-MIT Alliance-Chemical and Pharmaceutical Engineering program and a visiting professor of chemical engineering at the MIT. In 2013, he received the prestigious Odysseus Award from the Research
Foundation-Flanders to establish a research program on modelling-guided catalyst design at Ghent University.
Modeling-Guided Catalyst Design for Fischer-Tropsch synthesis: Structure, Activity, Selectivity and Stability
Catalyst design and kinetic modeling often start from molecular-scale hypotheses about the reaction mechanism,
the structure of the active sites and the nature of the rate and selectivity determining steps. Computational catalysis has become a crucial tool to analyze molecular-scale concepts and elucidate their electronic origin. In combination with characterization and experimental kinetic validation, insights gained from computational catalysis can be translated all the way to the industrial scale. This pas-de-deux between experiment and theory is becoming the new paradigm in catalyst design and kinetic modeling, both in academia and in industry.
In this presentation, I will illustrate how this approach can contribute to different aspect of catalysis research. The nature of catalytically active sites under reaction conditions often differs dramatically from the clean ideal surface. Using operando computational catalysis and insights into chemical bonding, we showed that the spontaneous formation of Co nano-islands during FT synthesis is driven by the stability of unusual
sigma-aromatic, square planar carbon species. Insight into the structure of the active sites provides the basis to elucidate the reaction mechanism. Again using operando computational catalysis, we developed a novel kinetic model that agrees with the experimentally measured kinetic parameters. This in turn forms the basis for to design catalyst with enhanced selectivity and stability. The success of this approach is illustrated with
the discovery of a boron promotor that enhances the stability of cobalt catalysts during Fischer-Tropsch synthesis of clean fuels by an order of magnitude.
References:
Zhuo, Borgna, Saeys, J Catal 297, 217, (2013)
Banerjee, Kuipers, Van Bavel, Saeys, ACS Catal., (2015)
Tan, Chang, Borgna, Saeys, J. Catal., 280, 50 (2011)
