Our group implements slice imaging to measure catalytic rates for site-specific elementary reactions thus offering remarkable opportunities to advance our fundamental understanding of heterogeneous catalysis.   Knowledge of elementary chemical reaction mechanisms in heterogeneous catalysis underlies our ability to construct comprehensive kinetic models for many such important chemical processes, in order to optimise them.
Our proposed strategy makes the formidable task of describing site-specific chemical reaction mechanisms and elementary rates in heterogeneous catalysis facile, while its necessity we justified Nature 2018, on the prototypical CO oxidation reaction on Pt by demonstrating that 40 years of traditional experimentation led to false interpretation of the reaction mechanism. Our aim is to characterize the important factors that influence the kinetics of elementary reactions at surfaces, e.g. the chemical nature of the catalyst and the geometry of the active site (stereodynamics). We chose elementary reactions involving C, H, O, N, as these are important in many key industries, such as the methane reforming, syngas, fuel cells, Fischer-Tropsch synthesis and the Haber-Bosch process.  Our strategy is that of a “bottom-up” approach to catalysis, i.e., building and understanding complex heterogeneous chemical catalysis, from the site-specific kinetics of the elementary building block reactions. Our measurements, serve for benchmarking first principles calculations of reaction rates in surface chemistry.  Our methodology measures the kinetics in the ms regime with temperatures in the 200 to 1000 K range, i.e, conditions more relevant to industrial conditions