REALCAT: A New Platform to Bring Catalysis to the Lightspeed

Abstract

Catalysis irrespective of its form can be considered as one of the most important pillars of today’s chemical industry. The development of new catalysts with improved performances is therefore a highly strategic issue. However, the a priori theoretical design of the best catalyst for a desired reaction is not yet possible and a time- and money-consuming experimental phase is still needed to develop a new catalyst for a given reaction. The REALCAT platform described in this paper consists in a complete, unique, integrated and top-level high-throughput technologies workflow that allows a significant acceleration of this kind of research. This is illustrated by some preliminary results of optimization of the operating conditions of glycerol dehydration to acrolein over an heteropolyacid-based supported catalyst. It is shown that using REALCAT high-throughput tools a more than 10-fold acceleration of the operating conditions optimization process is obtained.