Green Chemistry and Technology

Biography

Dr. Vesna Middelkoop has an interdisciplinary academic background in materials synthesis, the development of chemical reactors and their advanced characterization. She obtained a PhD degree in the field of synchrotron X-Ray characterization of materials synthesis processes from the University of London in 2010, having worked within the Industrial Materials Group of University College London, Chemistry Department and Birkbeck College, Crystallography Department. She has been working in the R&D industry in London before joining VITO, as a project engineer responsible for the strategic planning and delivery of complex measurement assemblies. Her current research focus is the development of novel structured (and 3D printed) materials for multi-phase chemical reactors (catalysts and adsorbents) within EU-funded and industrial contract research projects.      

Abstract

The ordered packing of chemical reactors has found wide application in environmental management (such as carbon structured monoliths for exhaust gas cleaning) and very limited application to date in the chemical industry due to the greater cost of capital investment involved in their manufacture in comparison to other shapes such as granules and beads. As opposed to the conventional randomly packed beds of catalyst bodies, structuring the catalysts into multi-channel reactors and bespoke 3D printed architectures will lead to greatly improved productivity/conversion due to the high surface area and precise and uniform product distribution.

The burgeoning demand for 3D printing technology is due to the method’s suitability as a means of controllable deposition of support and active material in order to produce structured catalyst arrays. The model reactor systems that will be showcased are innovatively employed in industrially relevant chemical reactions.  A monolithic multi-channel system was developed using co-printed carbon-supported Pd catalyst to improve organic chemical synthesis. Another system under study is graphene-oxide (GO) based 3D structured catalyst that was produced using a green, rapid, chemical synthesis route combining the unique properties of graphene and active nanocomposite particles for CO₂ utilisation reaction.

The initial results of this study on representative reactions are promising as no separation of the catalyst from the product is needed (with no leaching of the catalyst from the support). In addition to catalytic testing in order to extract the catalysts’ pertinent morphological and chemical information and feed it back into the development of the catalyst structures, a combination of conventional characterisation and advanced 3D imaging techniques at multiple resolutions were used.