A brief history of the science of catalysis II: from polytopes to hyperstructures

摘要

The possibility of detecting active sites and molecules in complex environments, and following their evolution, has revolutionized the field of heterogeneous catalysis over recent decades. It has been shown that active centres are not static at solid surfaces and may interact with each other through transport phenomena and structural flexibility. These interactions lead to spatio-temporal self-organization phenomena, in which both structural and kinetic effects play a role. As a consequence, catalytic reactions typically result in non-linear combinations of complexity structures of active sites. In this scenario, hyperstructures (namely Hv-structures) have recently been proposed as a model to describe the complexity of catalysts.