(576b) Mesocatalysis: An Investigation on the Complexity of Catalysis

It may be the time to discuss something about the next thing of nano catalysis. With the progress of investigations on catalysis, a smart and high-performance heterogeneous catalyst has no longer been viewed just as a material but a complex one with its constituent parts well-engineered with each other and it is advisable to design such high performance catalysts in artificial structures following the working principle of enzymes, of which structural features can be generalized as active centers and their peripheral environments——reactive centers, referenced to the tale of two irons and three proteins in the methane monooxygenase. With a catalyst in such structures, the reactants converted at the reactive centers have experienced a kind of 3D interactions under the constraint of the surrounding environments, which also modulates the reactive centers in multi aspects and shapes the reactants coming to and the products leaving from the reactive centers. High performance catalysts would be obtained by the appropriate integration of reactive centers, by the recognition among their peripheral groups, to larger scales. This should be viewed as an investigation on the complexity of catalysis. Here, we present several model or applicable systems of catalysis following the ideology abovementioned to investigate some challenging reactions, such as the production of benzaldehyde from benzene oxidation, ethanol synthesis from CO2 hydrogenation and the low-Pt catalyst for fuel cell, and etc.