Stable catalytic materials for emerging energy conversion technologies and greenhouse gas mitigation

超过95%的产品是通过催化合成的，随着我们进入一个向替代能源过渡的世界，可持续发展的关键将是实现这种转变。催化剂通过在实际时间尺度上（几秒到几百年）实现过程来显著降低能源需求，并且它们允许目标生产，同时显著减少废物的产生。理想情况下，生产线中的催化剂寿命应该是无限的，但催化剂会失活并需要频繁更换。它们中的许多含有昂贵的贵金属，并且失活损害了经济效益并增加了能耗。 我们的项目结合了化学家，材料和化学工程师的努力，为实际应用开发稳定催化剂的通用策略。通过这种策略，我们将能够在催化剂中长时间保持活性组分的新鲜特性，这就转化为生产效率在反应速率和减少的能量输入方面的数量级改进。 要制定的战略旨在对广泛的现有和新兴工艺具有通用性，但在短期内，我们将解决i）用于二氧化碳稳定的新兴技术，而无需为最终生产超清洁替代燃料和增值产品进行初步昂贵的分离，以及ii）目前在天然气汽车中面临经济挑战的排气处理系统。这两项技术将导致温室气体排放量的大幅减少，并使人们能够过渡到替代燃料，如沼气或废物衍生的先进生物燃料。

More than 95% by volume of all products are synthesized by means of catalysis, and as we are entering a world transitioning to alternative energy resources, the key to sustainable development will be to enable such transformations. Catalysts dramatically reduce energy requirements by enabling processes on practical time scales (seconds versus hundreds of years) and they allow target productions with significantly reduced waste generation. Ideally, a catalyst lifetime in a production line should be infinite, but catalysts suffer from deactivation and require frequent replacements. Many of them contain expensive noble metals, and the deactivation compromises economic benefits and increases energy consumption. Our project combines efforts from chemists, materials and chemical engineers to develop a universal strategy for stable catalyst development for real-world applications. With this strategy we will be able to maintain fresh-like properties of active components in catalysts for prolonged periods of time, which translates into an order of magnitude improvement in the production efficiency in terms of reaction rates and decreased energy input. The strategy to be developed is intended to be universal for a wide range of existing and emerging processes, but in the short term we will address i) the emerging technology for CO2 valorization without preliminary costly separation for the ultimate production of ultra-clean alternative fuels and value-added products, and ii) currently economically challenged exhaust treatment system in natural gas vehicles. Both technologies will lead to significant greenhouse gases emission reduction and enable the transition to alternative fuels, such as biogas or waste-derived advanced biofuels.