Organometallic Chemistry for Heterogeneous Catalysis

Meeting the challenges of the 21^st century requires accelerating the transitions from basic science to technology development and on to commercial applications. Fortunately the powerful analytical tools and communication options of the 21^st century enable chemists to rapidly assess their progress and communicate their results. This talk focuses on how we are using organometallic chemistry to facilitate the development of new materials for energy, catalysis, and computing applications. This talk will discuss synthesis of and catalysis by very stable, low-coordinate single site metals such as iron, cobalt, zinc, gallium, and other metals. These catalysts are extremely selective for a number of hydrocarbon transformations and stable to high temperatures. As a result, we have been able to catalyze reactions that are endothermic at ambient conditions with a high degree of selectivity by raising the temperature beyond anything that is ‘normal’ for organometallic chemistry (>500°C!). By understanding the surface chemistry of the catalysts and their oxide ‘ligands’ we can show how the structures affect the final fate of the surface bound metal species at high temperatures. The result can be a rapidly deactivating metal nanoparticle, poorly selective metal oxide nanoparticles, or a highly active and stable single site catalyst. All of these advances are in the context of rapidly moving the resulting knowledge towards successful implementation in prototype devices and processes. New results relating electronic structure to x-ray spectroscopic results will be presented that may explain a long-held debate about oxidation states and mechanism for well-studied but poorly understood catalysts.