A perspective of urgently required research into fundamental research into applied catalysis

Abstract

Section snippets

Catalyst production

In the future circular economy, industry will be forced to use raw materials of even lower qualities. Hence, understanding of the role of impurities on catalysis will become more important. Moreover, legislation on the registration of chemical substances, like REACH in Europe, will continue to become harsher in the future, and already now renders expensive and time-consuming toxicity tests necessary. This too will lead to an increasing pressure to more and more substitute currently-used

Catalyst performance and stability in the catalytic process

Industrially applied catalysts exist in a very broad variety of different shapes optimized for their processes from powders for fluidized bed applications, granules of different size, particularly shaped extrudates or tablets, to extended structures, like honeycombs. The vast majority of academic research on the other hand is done on materials that generally do not resemble actual catalysts. The much-diminished attention on single-crystal surfaces studied in ultra-high vacuum is indicative of

The future of fundamental applied catalysis research

The above-mentioned indicates that there are many fundamental questions that need to be addressed before the catalytic process can be fully appreciated. The desire to achieve sustainability necessitates significant advances in our tool box and efforts to characterize the catalytic process. A concerted effort between academic and industrial research and development will greatly help such endeavor. To appreciate the applied catalytic process, not only do the fundamentals of catalysis need to be

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Jeroen A. van Bokhoven: Writing – review & editing, Writing – original draft, Conceptualization. Gerhard Mestl: Writing – review & editing, Writing – original draft, Conceptualization.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.