High-throughput Synthesis And Combinatorial Optimization Of Multi-component Mesoporous Metal Oxides Via Ink Jet Printing Synthesis And Group Testing Strategy

The slow speed of catalyst’s screening and optimization is the bottleneck of industry catalytic technology. Combinatorial chemistry can greatly accelerate the screening process via it’s high-throughput synthesis and material optimization. The now high-throughput capacity is 200-2000 samples per day, far less than industry requirement. Ink-jet printing is one promising high-throughput synthesis method with precise and flexible mass production (1,000,000 samples per hour) capacity. The group testing strategy is an efficient high-throughput screening method. It establishes a straight-forward correspondence between the optimization path and discovered new catalytic materials via bisection method. We already proved that this combinatorial approach (ink-jet printing synthesis and group testing strategy) was successful in the identification of Mgo.82Ni0.02Cu0.5Ti1.0Ow as the best formulation for catalyzing liquid-phase hydrogen production. It will be of great interest to see if this methodology can be applied to other reaction systems. Here, we reported that fast optimization of mesoporous ternary metal oxide (CuCeZrOw) catalysts for n-hexane oxidation, one gas-solid reaction system. We identified the Cu0.32Ce0.28Zr1.00Ow composite as the optimal catalyst after exploring 4600 different candidates of CuCeZrOw in 72 catalytic activity tests, which was a 25000 reduction of evaluation and validation tests. The combinational discovery and optimization progress for catalytic oxidation of n-hexane had demonstrated the effectiveness of this combinational method in fast identification of optimal mesoporous metal oxide catalysts for gas-solid reaction systems. The outcome of this study might have immediate impact on the exploration of other functional material...