While Surface Science provided useful insights into a variety of materials of interest for catalysis, its contribution to the understanding of zeolites and clays has been limited. This was mainly due to the lack of suitable well-defined surfaces that successfully mimic the properties of these important materials while allowing its analysis using the vast toolkit of surface science. This talk will describe an aluminosilicate ultra-thin (~ 0.5 nm) film that was recently synthesized, which provides a good model system for zeolites and clays. It consists of a bilayer structure, as shown in the figure, and it counts with bridging hydroxyl groups. The latter are the active sites in zeolite catalysts, of great importance for energy transformations such as the cracking of crude oil and the methanol to gasoline conversion. This model system allows then to study the interaction of molecules involved in these catalytic processes and potentially contribute to the understanding of these chemical transformations. I will provide first a description of the system itself as characterized in ultra-high vacuum (UHV) conditions and then move on to analyze the interaction of these aluminosilicate films with different molecules of interest from UHV to near-ambient pressures.

References

[1] J.A. Boscoboinik, X. Yu, B. Yang, F.D. Fischer, R. Wlodarczyk, M. Sierka, S. Shaikhutdinov, J. Sauer, H.-J. Freund, Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 51 (2012) 24, 6005-6008. Angew. Chem. 124 (2012) 6107-6111.

[2] J.A. Boscoboinik, X. Yu, B. Yang, S. Shaikhutdinov, H.-J. Freund. Micropor. Mesopor. Mater. (2013) 165, 158-162.

[3] J.A. Boscoboinik, X. Yu, E. Emmez, B. Yang, S. Shaikhutdinov, F. Fischer, J. Sauer, H.-J. Freund. J. Phys. Chem. C (2013) 117, 13547-13556.