Chip to discover new and more efficient catalysts

For the development of novel and efficient heterogeneous catalysts, understanding of the kinetics and in particular the rate limiting steps are very important. A small increased catalyst efficiency has already enormous economic effects (e.g. in the chemical industries). With recent improvements of quantum cascade lasers (QCLs) a new type of IR spectrometer has become commercially available that is able to scan a complete spectrum in less than one microsecond. The strongly improved sampling speed allows (real time) measurements of kinetics with an accuracy that was never possible before. Conventional reactor setups that are used with fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) do not meet the required speed and control over its mass transport to explore this new time domain.

I propose a novel IR platform that enables heterogeneous catalytic analysis in this unexplored time domain by solving the mass transport problem.