Microporous catalytic combustion sensors: Devices and novel composite materials
Abstract
The ease with which transducers can be manufactured for chemical sensing applications vastly surpasses the ease with which they can be imbued with meaningful chemical selectivity. This work details the top-to-bottom functional design, synthesis and characterization of catalytic nanoassembled zeolite/ceramic composite materials. These materials are designed with the goal of being able to tune the selectivity of exothermic catalytic reactions which, on their own, typically possess little or no intrinsic reactant selectivity. The envisioned tunable selectivity stems from: (i) any selective activity the catalyst may have towards the reactants convoluted with (ii) the molecular sieving properties imposed on the reaction by a zeolite shell synthesized around the catalyst-containing sample. The synthetic procedures I have developed in this work allow both reactive and diffusive properties to be independently manipulated during synthesis, and enable the fabrication of sensing materials with the potential for being vastly more versatile than currently-existing materials. The synthesis of these materials is motivated by earlier studies of zeolite-modified microcalorimetric gas sensors, also presented in this work. These studies show that zeolite-based materials can be used to give differing responses to analyte gases. The fabrication of a high-throughput in situ infrared thermographic reactor for the analysis of the materials syntesized in this work is also presented here.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Buriak, Purdue University.
Subject Area
Chemistry|Chemistry|Chemical engineering
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