High throughput experimentation has met great success in drug design but it has, so far, been scarcely used in the field ofcatalysis. We present in this book the outcome of a NATO ASI meeting that was held in Vilamoura, Portugal, between July 15 and 28, 2001, with the objective of delineating and consolidating the principles and methods underpinning accelerated catalyst design, evaluation, and development. There is a need to make the underlying principles of this new methodology more widely understood and to make it available in a coherent and integrated format. The latter objective is particularly important to the young scientists who will constitute the new catalysis researchers generation. Indeed, this field which is at the frontier offundamental science and may be a renaissance for catalysis, is one which is much more complex than classical catalysis itself. It implies a close collaboration between scientists from many disciplines (chemistry, physics, chemical and mechanical engineering, automation, robotics, and scientific computing in general). In addition, this emerging area of science is also of paramount industrial importance, as progress in this area would collapse the time necessary to discover new catalysts or improve existing ones.

Catalysts are central in modern industrial chemistry and there is an urgent need to develop new catalysts. Such a rapid pace of development brings with it a new set of challenges at all levels of research, from synthesis and characterization to testing and modelling. This book reviews the current status of combinatorial catalysis, scientific catalyst design techniques, methods for preparing inorganic combinatorial libraries, experimental design methods, data processing, system modelling an simulation, and catalyst testing. The individual contributions reveal the development of high throughput catalyst design and test methods and identify the main challenges in the field, including new catalyst preparation techniques, rapid performance evaluation, and new microreactor configurations. Readership: All those working in catalytic process analysis and development. The extensive review of catalysis principles is especially relevant for postgraduate students seeking to pursue studies in catalysis.

Written by a team of internationally recognized experts, this book addresses the most important types of catalytic reactions and catalysts as used in industrial practice. Both applied aspects and the essential scientific principles are described. The main topics can be summarized as follows: heterogeneous, homogeneous and biocatalysis, catalyst preparation and characterization, catalytic reaction engineering and kinetics, catalyst deactivation and industrial perspective.

The book provides a comprehensive treatment of combinatorial development of heterogeneous catalysts. In particular, two computer-aided approaches that have played a key role in combinatorial catalysis and high-throughput experimentation during the last decade — evolutionary optimization and artificial neural networks — are described. The book is unique in that it describes evolutionary optimization in a broader context of methods of searching for optimal catalytic materials, including statistical design of experiments, as well as presents neural networks in a broader context of data analysis. It is the first book that demystifies the attractiveness of artificial neural networks, explaining its rational fundamental — their universal approximation capability. At the same time, it shows the limitations of that capability and describes two methods for how it can be improved. The book is also the first that presents two other important topics pertaining to evolutionary optimization and artificial neural networks: automatic generating of problem-tailored genetic algorithms, and tuning evolutionary algorithms with neural networks. Both are not only theoretically explained, but also well illustrated through detailed case studies./a

In this first book to present every important aspect of this fascinating and developing field, the three editors A. Hagemeyer, P. Strasser and A. F. Volpe Jr. from Symyx Technologies have chosen a perfect mixture of distinguished, international authors from both academia and industry. Each chapter is devoted to a major topic - high-throughput experimentation methodologies, integrated combinatorial synthesis and screening workflow, and applications to chemical catalysts with an emphasis on heterogeneous catalysis, olefin polymerization and electrocatalysis for fuel cells. An indispensable source for everyone working in the field.