Nanocarbon aerogel catalysts for chemical flow processes Sean Leggatt-Bulaitis, Dr Jamie Mannering, Dr Robert Menzel School of Chemistry, University of Leeds, Leeds, LS2 9JT Continuous flow systems have been used for the past twenty years in the drive to automate chemical processes. [1] Researchers have endeavoured to convert batch catalytic systems to flow processes, leading to an improvement in scale, efficiency, safety, and cost. Currently, industrial chemical processes tend to use homogeneous catalysts for their optimised yields, conversions, and selectivity. [2] Yet there are many challenges such as sustainability, cost, and modifiability, that homogeneous processes face. Heterogeneous catalysts present a more versatile, robust, and comparatively cheaper approach to catalysing chemical processes in flow. Conventional commercial heterogeneous catalysts tend to be powders, which prove difficult to retrieve, are prone to leaching and problematic to implement into packed bed reactor systems. Herein, this work shows effective use of macro-structured reduced graphene oxide (rGO) aerogels as catalyst supports in fine chemical catalysis and small molecule electrocatalysis. Benefits of using 3D materials that fit directly into packed bed reactors include improving reaction kinetics through a series of factors: diffusion, confinement, and mass transport. In conjunction with this, we show that ice-templated hydrothermal synthesis of rGO aerogels enables fine-tuning of pore size, pore alignment and nanoparticle dispersity. Resultant metal nanoparticle-decorated rGO aerogels have appealing properties (i.e. large surface areas, high porosities, mechanical strength, impressive electrical and thermal conductivity) for use in fine-chemical flow reactors (such as Ru decorated rGO aerogels for transfer hydrogenation processes). These fine-chemical reactions give indications of how metal nanoparticle decorated rGO aerogels will fare in electrocatalytic flow systems (e.g. electrochemical CO 2 reduction). Through the implementation of heterogeneous catalysis in flow, robust and uncomplicated practices can be designed for a variety of valuable (electro)chemical reactions, leading to sustainable and efficient development of future catalytic systems. References 1. Acc. Chem. Res. 2019, 52, 10, 2858–2869. 2. Nat. Catal. 2020, 3, 135-142.
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