Catalysts are critical materials for enabling many modern industrial chemical processes, such as the dehydrogenation of light alkanes to produce “on purpose” alkenes. Catalyst deactivation costs the chemical industry billions of dollars. One of the major mechanisms of deactivation is metal sintering during high temperature regeneration. Atomic Layer Deposition (ALD) overcoating has previously been demonstrated to stabilize catalyst materials against sintering and deactivation, as well as improve selectivity in certain cases. In this study the properties and performance of 0.1% Pt/Al₂O₃ catalysts are investigated as a function of surface modification via ALD Al₂O₃ coatings. The catalysts are characterized in Forge Nano’s in-house catalyst characterization laboratory. Physical characterization is performed using various techniques including moisture analysis, BET Surface Area, Porosimetry, TGA, CO Chemisorption, ICP-MS, and Temperature Programmed Reduction, Desorption, and Oxidation. Performance is characterized using propane dehydrogenation under a variety of conditions. This talk will present the effects of Forge Nano’s ALD Al₂O₃ coating on the properties and performance of the 0.1% Pt/Al₂O₃ catalysts.

Interfaces play an essential role in nearly all aspects of life and are critical for electrochemistry. Electrochemical systems ranging from high-temperature solid oxide fuel cells (SOFC) to batteries to capacitors have a wide range of essential interfaces between solids, liquids, and gases which play a pivotal role in how energy is stored, transferred, and converted. This talk will focus on using ambient pressure XPS (APXPS) to directly probe the solid/gas and solid/liquid electrochemical interface. APXPS is a photon-in/electron-out process that can provide both atomic concentration and chemical-specific information at pressures greater than 20 Torr. Using synchrotron X-rays at Lawrence Berkeley Nation Laboratory, the Advanced Light Source has several beamlines dedicated to APXPS endstations that are outfitted with various in situ/operando features such as heating to temperatures > 500 °C, pressures greater than 20 Torr to support solid/liquid experiments and electrical leads to support applying electrical potentials support the ability to collect XPS data of actual electrochemical devices while it's operating in near ambient pressures. This talk will share our efforts to combine theory and APXPS to understand the chemistry at solid/gas and solid/liquid interfaces under in situ and operando conditions. At the solid/gas interface, we will share our work to understand how carbon dioxide interacts with copper and silver surfaces using APXPS and theory to generate observables that we could experimentally verify. Separately I will introduce our strategy to introduce a chemical reaction network to generate spectra of water interacting with a silver surface that directly resembled our APXPS measurements. At the solid/liquid interface, the combination of theory and APXPS revealed how stable magnesium electrodes and stable diglyme electrolytes could be unstable when in contact with each other. In addition, it facilitated the prediction of the sensitivity for probing interfacial chemical species at a solid/liquid interface. To further advance these directions and synergy for combining theory and experiments, I will show our recent progress in creating an interfacial Digital Twin that we hope will rapidly accelerate our understanding of interfacial chemistry.

The solid-liquid electrochemical interface offers a two-dimensional environment for geometrically confined interfacial reactions to tailor electrode surface chemistry under operating conditions. Herein, we demonstrate that the dissolution and redeposition kinetics of transition metal cations, a ubiquitous phenomenon at the electrochemical interface, can be manipulated to regulate the chemical composition and crystal structure of the electrode surface as well as the overall electrochemical performance. Foreign cations, either added as electrolyte additives or dissolved from surface coatings, can rapidly participate in the electrode dissolution-redeposition process, and facilitate the establishment of the dissolution-redeposition equilibrium. We will present scientific case studies in electrocatalysis. Our work expands the control over the electrochemical reactions at the solid-liquid interface and provides new insights into interfacial studies in electrochemistry, and surface science.

Porous materials offer an opportunity for catalysis in confined spaces. By spatially confining chemistry, reaction dynamics and selectivity can change in unknown ways. Two examples will be discussed, including Pt nanoparticles embedded in a thin film of the metal-organic framework UiO-66(NH₂) and a two-dimensional silicate on Pd(111). Ambient pressure X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (APXPS) has been used to characterize the electronic structure of the Pt-embedded metal-organic framework. CO oxidation and CO₂ reduction have been followed with IR spectroscopy and mass spectrometry. In a second system, the space between a two-dimensional silicate and a Pd(111) surface promotes more CO oxidation than a bare Pd surface. IR spectroscopy shows that the silicate film changes the surface adsorbates, resulting in increased CO₂ formation, as confirmed with mass spectrometry. These results will help enable the rational design of materials to spatially confine reactions in a desired way.