High-Throughput

Catalyst discovery is at the heart of countless chemical processes which we rely on as a society. The currently touted number of industrial chemical processes which require a catalyst sits between 80-90 %. So, we know that catalysts are really useful: in many cases these allow us to lower the energy required for a reaction, and can be used to access reactive pathways which generate less waste. But what do we need to improve?

There are two key ways that contemporary catalysis research moves us forward:
(i) We can discover new catalytic pathways, which helps us improve existing processes by finding new, lower energy and lower waste routes to the things we need.
(ii) We can avoid the use of so-called Nobel metals (think Pd, Pt, Rh), which are horribly expensive and scarce and so will really need to be displaced in the long run, by more readily accessible Earth-abundant alternatives.

In our group, we tackle both of these topics: for example, the Single-Centre Ambiphile concept looks to open new mechanistic pathways in bond activation and catalysis, whilst also using Earth-abundant elements so that this chemistry remains accessible and applicable. The exploration of Alkaline Earth catalysts which can challenge common transition metal processes also leads us down a sustainable path towards the real implementation of these Earth-abundant metals in catalysis.

All of this sounds simple, but is actually not straight-forward. Our ligand design concepts assure that we can rapidly access a diverse family of systems. Through a combinatorial approach, we can then easily access develop these catalysts, before applying them in catalytic reactions. We are looking for a real paradigm shift here, and so a lot of these reactions have never been achieved before. We therefore use a rapid screening approach to accelerate the discovery of systems which can achieve good catalytic turnover in our key target reactions.

Our approach here uses a modified 1L Parr Reactor, with custom PTFE inserts which allows us to conduct 78 reactions at a time, using any gaseous reactant (e.g. H₂, NH₃, CO₂, ethylene). Reactions are conducted in GC vials, so can be directly loaded onto an automated GC-MS carousel for analysis. In the near future this will be coupled with a robotic dispensing unit derived from a 3D printer (thanks Helge!) to accelerate sample preparation, through programmed combinatorial mixing of e.g. 10 ligands and 10 TM precursors, plus substrate. Ultimately, we aim to add to this an automated GC-MS device, with full robotic transfer of samples between dispenser, autoclave, and analysis carousel for a fully automated high-throughput catalysis setup. We’re really excited about this, so watch this space!