Tuning the Molecular Design of Catalytic Materials to Increase Activity and Selectivity for Fine Chemical Production

Catalyst design can impact catalytic activity and selectivity. For heterogeneous catalytic materials, design is challenging since common synthetic methods tend to produce a distribution of catalytic sites. Through utilizing organic synthetic techniques, we demonstrate the ability to finely tune the catalytic properties of materials to increase catalytic activity. Specifically, we demonstrate that through controlling the alkyl linker length and the loading of the organosilane that we can tune molecular interactions to increase catalytic activity and selectivity for the isomerization of glucose to fructose. We extend this approach to creating well-defined catalytic sites in zeolites, which enables fine-tuning of the spacing between catalytic sites in the framework. These modifications improve catalytic activity relative to isolated catalytic sites.