Tailoring surfaces in porous materials for catalysis and separation applications

Abstract

Catalytic processes are important and widely studied chemical processes aimed at making chemical reactions as efficient and environmentally friendly as possible. Heterogeneous catalysis involves the use of a generally highly porous, solid catalytic material with liquid or gaseous reactant molecules. Two important factors determining the overall performance of a heterogeneous catalytic material are the interactions of any species present during the process with the catalyst surface and the mass transport of said species through the porous network of the catalytic materials. Therefore, it is desirable to tailor the surface chemistry and pore structures of catalytic materials to exploit these factors and give catalytic materials with increased performance. An overview of the impact of mass transport and reactant-catalyst surface interactions are given in Chapter 1. In this thesis, Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) methods, amongst others, are used to quantitatively characterise mass transport through the pores of catalytic materials and also probe the strength of surface interactions between guest molecules and the solid surface. Pulsed-Field Gradient (PFG)-NMR and NMR relaxation are used to study diffusion and molecular dynamics of relevant molecules in the pores of porous materials with a particular focus on catalytic materials. As such an outline of such NMR methods are given in Chapter 2 as well as an evaluation and comparison of other methods used for the same purpose.

Date of Award	1 Aug 2022
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The University of Manchester
Supervisor	Carmine D'Agostino (Supervisor), Mathias Nilsson (Supervisor) & Chris Hardacre (Supervisor)