single catalyst particle diagnostics - using magnetic and electric fields
Miguel Solsona is a PhD student in the BIOS Lab-on-a-chip group. His supervisor is prof.dr.ir. A. van den Berg from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science and prof.dr.ir. B.M. Weckhuysen from Utrecht University.
Heterogeneous catalysts are solid materials that speed up and/or enable chemical reactions. However, due to their fabrication process, they end up having large inter and intra‐particle heterogeneities. Typical activity and selectivity characterization of these materials is performed in batch reactors providing averaged experimental results. This hinders the knowledge of the individual role of each particle and decreases the understanding of the phenomena. On the other hand, single catalyst particle characterization uses expensive technology providing a low throughput. Hence, there is a need for inexpensive single particle characterization systems. During the last couple of decades microfluidic technologies have evolved to sort and analyse single cells at high throughput. By using electric, magnetic, acoustic waves, or simply the inertia of fluids inside microsystems, the microfluidics community has developed many technologies to handle, sort and analyse microparticles and cells.
In this thesis, we employed some of the previously developed technologies, modified them or simply invented new ones to analyse catalyst particles at single particle level. With this approach, we could close the gap between single catalyst particle characterization and inexpensive technology and, where possible, at high throughput.
