LESSONS LEARNT AND PERSPECTIVES FOR HIGH THROUGHPUT EXPERIMENTATION AT ACADEMIA/INDUSTRY INTERFACE FOR CATALYSIS AND CONNECTED DOMAINS

摘要

A decade ago, in the preface of a book entitled "High-throughput analysis, a tool for combinatorial materials science", edited by Potyrailo and Amis [1], it was stated that the recognized successes of combinatorial chemistry in the pharmaceutical industry have been chased by an exponential growing number of discoveries of new materials in chemistry and material science. Within the impressive range of cited materials and workflows, catalysts and adsorbents were ranked among the most promising case studies for demonstrating the efficiency of this apparently all mighty and practically self sufficient methodology, as also stressed in another book published at the same period, focused on principles and methods for accelerating catalysts design and testing [2]. The need of new High-Throughput (HT) tools able to synthesize, analyze and screen small-size samples with high precision and accuracy by utilizing serial or parallel set-ups, adapted to catalysis and adsorption/separation, was also highly ranked among the various recommendations proposed at that time. The ultimate dream was already thought to be able to carry out HT analyses in situ or even better operando to rank the tested materials under realistic conditions, providing the highest chance for the "hits" to be reproducible after up-scaling to pilot and then process scale. With the passing of time, we can consider from the content of these books that the HT methodology applied to material science and catalysis was a decade ago already producing highly sophisticated concepts and tools, with convincing lab-scale demonstration for various case studies. However, the efficiency of the methodology at industrial level still remained an enigma.