Solid acid catalysts, which have favorable characteristics such as efficient activity, high selectivity, long catalyst life and ease in recovery and reuse, have great potential for efficiently transforming lignocellulosic biomass into biofuels and can replace many conventional liquid acids for hydrolysis and pretreatment. This work briefly introduces conventional biomass pretreatment and hydrol...

The catalytic oxidization of CS2 over atmospheric particles and some oxide catalysts was explored through FT-IR, MS and a fixed-bed stainless steel reactor. The results show that atmospheric particles and some oxide catalysts exhibited considerable oxidizing activities for CS2 at ambient temperature. The reaction products are mainly COS and elemental sulfur, even CO2 on some catalysts. Among th...

Efficient catalysts are crucial for the sustainable generation of fuel by splitting water. A versatile screening protocol would simplify the identification of novel and better catalysts by using high throughput experimentation. Herein, such a screening approach for the identification of molecular catalysts for chemical oxidation of water is reported, which is based on oxygen-sensitive fluoresce...

Introduction Amorphous materials have no long-range order at the atomic length scale and show different properties as compared to typical crystalline materials. Among of them, amorphous alloys are in thermodynamically nonequilibrium, crystallized by heating and used as catalysts and catalyst precursors. Investigations on the relationships between their catalytic performances and structural chan...

The synthesis of olefin metathesis catalysts containing chiral, monodentate N-heterocyclic carbenes and their application to asymmetric ring-closing metathesis (ARCM) are reported. These catalysts retain the high levels of reactivity found in the related achiral variants (1a and 1b). Using the parent chiral catalysts 2a and 2b and derivatives that contain steric bulk in the meta positions of th...

The utilization of biogas as carbon source for the co-production of filamentous-like materials and syngas is proposed. Catalysts with different Ni:Al molar ratios, Al2O3 supports and preparation methods were synthesized. The suitability of the catalysts was analyzed considering activity, stability and carbon yield. Catalysts showed a good performance and similar results according to syngas comp...

Developing efficient and economical noble-metal free catalysts for oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) is one of the essential factors for the industrialization of fuel cells. Recent studies on transition metal ORR catalysts have become the priority to practical low-temperature fuel cells. Herein, we proposed a novel in situ design, Fe2N nanoparticles (NPs) in an N doped porous carbon matrix (Fe2N@...

Selectivity in the catalytic functionalization of complex molecules is a major challenge in chemical synthesis. The problem is magnified when there are several possible stereochemical outcomes and when similar functional groups occur repeatedly within the same molecule. Selective polyene oxidation provides an archetypical example of this challenge. Historically, enzymatic catalysis has provided...

Carbon nanotubes were synthesized over a series of Zn-containing Fe/alumina catalysts by chemical vapor deposition method at two reaction temperatures of 850 and 950 °C using methane as a carbon source. Catalysts were synthesized by keeping Fe concentration constant and varying Zn concentration to study the effects of Zn. The catalysts were characterized using X – ray powder diffraction and N2 ...

The identification of surface intermediates is an important step in determining the mechanism of a reaction and in developing an in-depth understanding of a catalytic process. In this work the surface species formed during methane decomposition on idealized single-crystal Ru catalysts (using high-resolution electron energy loss spectroscopy, HREELS) are compared to the surface species identifie...