The Catalyst Review asked Dr. Khurana to provide his perspective on what he believes to be the greatest challenges that industry faces regarding the use of current catalyst technology.

摘要

Catalyst technology is prevalent in a vast majority of industrial applications ranging from petroleum refining, chemical, and polymer production (energy, materials, food, and medical industries), environmental emission abatement, and more recently in the transition to and development of cleaner, renewable and sustainable energy sources. Even though catalyst technology is indispensable due to such widespread extensive application, catalysis science technology is complex owing to its multi-disciplinary nature (chemistry, material science, and biotechnology) and the need to manipulate the nature of catalyst at the atomic level. While homogeneous catalysis encounters challenges with catalyst recovery/recycling and catalyst thermal stability, heterogenous catalysis faces challenges with not so well-defined active sites and catalyst diffusivity. In addition, there are some major challenges shared by homogeneous as well as heterogeneous catalysts, which include catalyst deactivation (particularly in heterogeneous catalysis), selectivity-conversion limit/trade-off, and scarcity of intrinsic (scale-independent) reaction kinetics required for the scale-up of catalyst technology.