Small improvements in efficiency and/or selectivity of nanoparticle catalysts, frequently used in the chemical industry, result in billions of Euros of revenue increase. Catalytic nanoparticles are also of central importance for pollution mitigation and in sustainable energy technologies such as fuel cells, batteries and hydrogen storage. For these reasons, atomic level engineering of catalytic nanoparticles has an enormous potential impact.
The catalytic performance of nanoparticles is directly controlled by their size, shape and chemical composition. These properties determine which surface sites that are exposed to the reactants and, therefore, activity and selectivity. Accordingly, significant advances in the shape-selected synthesis of nanoparticles have brought about exciting opportunities for capitalizing on such effects. Experimental investigations are, however, traditionally conducted on nanoparticle ensembles. As a result they are plagued by inhomogeneous sample material and averaging effects, which deny access to the understanding of important details related to size, shape, microstructure and composition of nanocatalysts. Conceptually, this problem can be entirely eliminated by experiments on individual nanoparticles. Secondly, under reaction conditions, the gas composition in a macroscopic catalytic reactor is not well defined locally. As a result, the catalyst can take on different oxidation states or experience different reactant mixtures at different positions. In-spite of this, catalyst activity is measured as the average of the production from all catalytic material, assuming that it can be described by a single set of parameters everywhere. This makes it very difficult if not impossible to isolate the importance of different catalyst properties for its performance.
It is therefore the main objective of the SINCAT project to take on this challenge by establishing a nanofluidic reactor that enables the scrutiny of heterogeneous catalytic reactions at the individual catalytic nanoparticle level. The nanoreactor is integrated with local optical plasmonic nanoantenna probes and mass spectrometric readout from a very small number of nanoparticles for the combined in situ and real time analysis of the catalyst surface/oxidation state and of the product molecules. In this way it enables establishing structure-function correlations at operando conditions for multiple individual nanoparticles in parallel, as well as studying mass transport and particle-particle interaction effects in well-controlled nano-confined space mimicking the pores of industrially used support materials.
