Preface

Catalysis Quo Vadis?

Catalysis is of all times. In ancient times mankind used fermentation for production of alcoholic beverages and conservation purposes. Catalysis was also at the origin of the agricultural revolution through the synthesis of ammonia. In the industrialization era the increasing demand for basic chemicals focused the catalyst development for large scale production of a single specific bulk chemical. In the past century these developments continued, and, under strong societal drive for sustainability, focused on improved and intensified production routes with higher feedstock and energy efficiency.

Further, catalytic attention increasingly focused on the production of fine chemicals, pharmaceutics and food additives. Here, however, relatively large fractions of undesired by‐products are formed in the multistep production routes, while intermediate separation treatments can be pretty energy intensive.

Ideally these chemical production routes should take place in a single reaction environment with different immobilized specific catalytic centres acting in concert, without intermediate separation of product mixtures and removal of catalyst, evolving towards the functioning of a cell, the wet dream of many catalytic scientists.

Such an integration of reaction sequences requires combined efforts in catalysis and engineering. In the last decades a strong evolution towards structuring of catalytic systems can be observed, in heterogeneous catalysis (zeolites, nanocrystallites), homogeneous catalysis (well‐defined local environment of the active centre) and engineering (reactor internals, structured catalyst bodies, microreactors), covering the whole relevant range characteristic time and length scales of processes.

Combining various reactions in one process unit requires the presence of different catalytic centres, either in different catalysts, or in one particle where sometimes close proximity is required, e.g. like in the industrial bifunctional hydroisomerization catalyst.

In the last decade new types of hybrid materials drew increasing attention of the scientific community, the metal organic frameworks, MOFs, or porous coordination polymers, PCPs. Like zeolites these are crystalline porous materials, but built up regularly from organic and inorganic building blocks, having a vast variability in composition, porosity and functionality, much larger than the classical inorganic porous materials.

Because of this huge variability, MOFs have been attributed a large application potential in various fields, including adsorption, separation, storage, sensing, optoelectronics, magnetism….and catalysis. The latter will be obvious to those skilled in the art. MOFs can be functionalized at the organic or inorganic linker, or catalytic units can be accommodated in their pore space. In principle each linker or node can be or transformed into an active site, resulting in combinations of high dispersion and high loading, while several different functionalities can be combined in one system.

There seems to be no limit to which system is incorporated in a MOF, inorganic centres, metallo‐organic complexes or organo‐catalytic centres, and even enzymes can be immobilized. In this sense MOFs hold promises as the link between homogeneous and heterogeneous catalysis, realising the wet dream of many catalytic scientists, provided that turnover numbers can be achieved that are large enough to be competitive.

MOF have been discovered by the catalysis community and rapid developments are taking place. This book is the first of its kind completely devoted to this topic. With contributions of major players in the field it is not just a literature review with the developments until 2012, but also the strategies behind these developments are discussed. As such it has a lasting didactic and reference value and is a must for both experts and novices.

Freek Kapteijn

Avelino Corma