Professor Ortalan receieved part of an NSF-DMREF collaborative award

September 15, 2014

The collaborative team of Profs. Jeffrey Greeley, Volkan Ortalan, and Fabio Ribeiro of Purdue University, and Chao Wang of Johns Hopkins University, have been awarded a grant under the National Science Foundation Designing Materials to Revolutionize and Engineer our Future (DMREF) initiative to develop a new strategy. The team proposes to make accurate predictions from a combination of experiments with atomic-level resolution and modeling using large-scale computing. Such predictive techniques have been explored for simple classes of catalytic materials, such as highly ordered metal or oxide surfaces. However, a much broader space of potentially exciting catalysts can be accessed by exploring so-called "multifunctional" materials, which offer complex interfaces between metals and oxides. The researchers will combine unparalleled atomic-scale experimental characterization, synthesis, and reactivity measurements to both inform the computational models and test predicted catalysts to emerge from the computational analysis. The proposed program will both lay the fundamental groundwork for accelerated identification of breakthrough catalytic materials, in general, and identify practical new catalysts for reactions with CO, CO2, and H2 as feedstocks, in particular. Read more.