Catalysis and Self-Assembly (CATSA)

Heterogeneous catalysts are materials that speed up chemical reactions. They are needed to make things like fertilizers, medicines, fuels, and plastics. In short, we need them for most products! To make sustainable products competitive with fossil-based products, we need more efficient heterogeneous catalysts for many chemical reactions. Examples are production of H2 from water, production of chemicals from CO2, and production of food and materials from woody biomass.

Our mission is to develop fundamental concepts to improve catalysts for all these processes. We are guided by questions such as:

• What is the reaction mechanism in terms of elementary reaction steps?
• How can catalysts be optimized with respect to spatial distributions of active sites?
• How can the location of active sites be probed by innovative methods?
• How can scaling relations in catalysis be broken for more active catalysts?
• How can confinement effects be leveraged for more active and selective catalysts?

Representative publications: J. Am Chem. Soc. 2020, 142, 14481 ; ACS Catal. 2024, 14, 3191

We develop self-assembly (spontaneous organization of small components into organized structures) to make new materials from nanoscale building blocks. We then explore applications of these materials in areas ranging from printed electronics to thermal insulation. Examples of questions that direct our efforts are:

• How should nanomaterials like cellulose nanofibers or graphene derivatives be hierarchically structured (e.g. in insulating foams, or in organic electronic devices)?
• What chemical functionalization should be applied to the nanoscale components to achieve self-assembly into the desired hierarchical structures?

We also use self-assembly to design model catalysts that we use to answer fundamental questions in heterogeneous catalysis.

Representative publications: Langmuir 2019, 35, 4460 ; Chem. Mater. 2018, 30, 2084

Sometimes, current characterization tools cannot provide the necessary information to understand and optimize materials. In these cases, we develop new characterization! For instance, with Professor Marc Hellmuth (Stockholm University), we develop computational geometry software to analyze electron tomograms. With this characterization, we aim to extract new information about catalyst nanostructure. We believe this information will enable new concepts to improve heterogeneous catalysts.