Projects

Climate change is a major environmental concern and the main cause is the excessive emission of anthropogenic greenhouse gases such as CO2. Aside from low-emission processes and reduction strategies, carbon capture and utilization (CCU) of current large point-sources will be of utmost importance to transition from a CO2-exhaust-heavy economy to a more carbon-neutral one. The direct hydrogenation of CO2 into olefins is a promising CCU ...

Fe- and Cu-zeolites are active catalysts for direct catalytic decomposition of NO and N2O and for selective oxidation of hydrocarbons. While bent [Cu-O-Cu]2+ cores were recently identified as the active sites in direct NO and N2O decomposition and in selective oxidation chemistry, Fe sites though very active, have not been characterized in such detail. It is the goal of this project to do so in a joint effort between COK, CCC and Stanford. ...

Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are crystalline nanoporous materials that consist of inorganic metal-containing nodes connected by polytopic organic linkers. MOFs are promising materials for novel applications in various industries because of their high specific surface area, synthetic flexibility and tunable structure-property relationships. For many application areas, such as catalysis, molecular separation and gas storage, MOFs can be ...

This PhD intends a strong collaboration with fermentation research. Given fermentation effectively converts carbohydrate to a variety of carbonyls, chemocatalysis may be a promising tool to further upgrade these bio-based platform chemicals to added value products for the chemical industry. This PhD thus will study new catalytic pathways to convert such carbonyls, such as ketoacids, aldehydes and hydroxy-fatty acids selectively into a variety ...

Porous solids are excellent catalyst and adsorbents. In general, porous materials could be classified based on their pore size distribution which cover indiscriminately the micro (<2 nm), meso (2–50 nm), and macro (>50 nm) size ranges. The active sites of the porous solids such as zeolites are often confined in their micropores which can impose severe mass-transfer constraints. Diffusion which is the main mechanism of mass transfer in ...

MOF as catalysis is paid much attention due to its high pore volume and surface area which allow the facile access of substrates to the catalytically active sites. Also these unsaturated metal sites create opportunities in adsorptive application. The removal of s-compound from fossil fuels remains an important topic because of the air pollution and strict regulations imposed by government. Therefore, MOF as a potential catalyst and adsorbent ...