High‐Throughput Screening of Catalyst Libraries for Emissions Control

Catalysis plays a very important role in sustainable and green chemistry applications such as renewable resources for energy and fuels, waste recovery and recycling and low- or even zero-emissions power plants, chemical production sites and vehicles. Emissions control and environmental protection are new challenges that call for novel and far more efficient catalysts to be developed in short time periods. In this chapter, examples of the application of high-throughput methods to heterogeneously catalyzed green chemistries are discussed. High-throughput and combinatorial catalysis is ideally suited for the discovery of novel noble metal and mixed metal oxide catalyst formulations for total combustion/volatile organic compound (VOC) removal, emissions control from stationary and mobile sources (NOx abatement, CO oxidation, automotive three-way catalysis) because simple gas-phase feeds and product mixes allows for truly parallel detection and very high sample throughputs. Furthermore, these methods are advantageously applicable to multicomponent catalysts (e.g. mixed metal oxides, alloys) for selective oxidation, hydrogenation, dehydrogenation and refining, including desulfurization and denitrification. Additionally, improved fast analytical techniques are making it increasingly possible to perform high-throughput experimentation on complex real plant or vehicle feeds. This chapter focuses on the primary screening of metal oxides for low-temperature CO oxidation and VOC combustion using infrared thermography reactors and SCR DeNOx of wafer-formatted catalyst libraries using scanning mass spectrometry. Keywords: high-throughput screening; heterogeneous catalysis; catalyst libraries; emissions control