CBE Seminar: An Atomic-Scale Perspective on Catalyst Stability and on the Nature of the Active Site When the Reaction Is Taking Place

Non-UCI people, please use this registration link: https://forms.gle/4KSspSPEMgnHp3VL7

Abstract: Addressing the question of the nature of the active site has been a central challenge in various types of catalysis (thermal heterogeneous, electrocatalysis, etc.) for a long time. With the advent of modern instrumentation providing atomic-scale information about catalytic surfaces, including under reaction conditions, and powerful spectroscopies combined with ever-increasing computational speed enabling extensive electronic structure calculations, addressing the question on the nature of the active site has become more viable. In this talk, we will discuss examples of catalytic reactions, whereby a combination of reaction kinetics and characterization experiments with microkinetic modeling, informed by first-principles calculations, allows the derivation of insights on the reaction mechanism at the elementary step level and the nature of the active site when the reaction is taking place. The role of spectator species versus active intermediates turning reactants over to products will be elucidated.

The second objective of this talk is to discuss catalyst stability, a property equally important to its activity and selectivity, and which often determines whether a catalytic process becomes financially viable or not.

Bio: Manos Mavrikakis is the Ernest Micek Distinguished Chair, the James A. Dumesic Professor, and the Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He received a diploma in chemical engineering from NTUA in Greece, and a doctorate in chemical engineering and scientific computing from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Following postdocs at the University of Delaware and the Technical University of Denmark, he joined the faculty of chemical engineering at UW-Madison. His main research interests include the elucidation of detailed reaction mechanisms for thermal heterogeneously catalyzed and electrocatalyzed reactions and the identification of improved catalytic materials from first-principles-based microkinetic modeling. Bridging the pressure gap between UHV experiments and atmospheric/higher pressure experiments in catalysis has been at the heart of his research group work.

Mavrikakis has been elected a fellow of APS (2013), AAAS (2014) and AVS (2016). He served as department chair (2015-2018) and was a Visiting Miller Research Professor at UC Berkeley in chemistry in 2019. He received the 2009 Paul H. Emmett award and the 2021 Burwell Lectureship from the North American Catalysis Society, the 2014 R. H. Wilhelm award from AIChE and the 2019 Gabor A. Somorjai award from ACS. He served as editor-in-chief of Surface Science between 2012 and 2020.

Host: Professor Plamen Atanassov