Simultaneous Screening of Catalysts in Microchannels: Methodology and Experimental Setup

Abstract

Given the excellent properties of microfluidic reactors our project aims to develop a fast and parallelized catalyst screening unit. In a first step the channel- walls of microstructured wafers are coated with catalytic active species. For the screening of catalytic properties a stack of 35 catalyst wafers is operated under steady-state conditions and continuous flow. Each wafer is exposed to the same amount of reactant gases at the same time, temperature and pressure. The product analysis is carried out using mass spectrometry for each catalyst wafer in order to gain full chemical information of the product distribution, conversion degrees and selectivities. A fast, sequentially sampling device is used to sample each catalyst wafer at least every 60 minutes.