Making porous supraparticles for catalysis

Making porous supraparticles for catalysis
1st supervisor and 2nd promotor: Prof. Xuehua Zhang
2nd supervisor and 1st promotor: Prof. Detlef Lohse
3rd promotor: TBA
Affiliation: University of Twente
Research theme: Catalyst Diagnostics to Develop More Active Catalysts

We want to explore a new and original bottom-up technology to create a self-assembled extremely porous hierarchical catalyst and to show the efficiency of this catalyst. It is based on the so-called ouzo effect, with which nanodroplets nucleate  out of a ternary liquid of appropriate mutual solubilites. The idea is that nanoparticles attach to the nucleating nanodroplets. On further evaporation the nanoparticles will form very porous hierarchical structure which can be produced in large quantities and which have great potential as heterogenous catalysts.

Keywords:

• Catalyst
• Ouzo effect
• Hierarchical porous structure
• Droplet nucleation