Industrial catalysis: Strategies to enhance selectivity

Precise control of catalytic selectivity is a key concept of green chemistry, and also an important driving force for the sustainable development of catalytic industry. Selectivity not only determines the atomic economy of the catalytic process, but also affects the energy consumption of subsequent separation process. The objective of this review is to illustrate successful catalyst design strategies to enhance selectivity, by using several important catalytic cases of petroleum refining and petrochemicals. These industrial applications and cutting-edge research cases mainly use the strategies of coupling, decoupling or confinement of adsorption sites and active sites to tune the diffusion barrier and activation energy barrier in different routes, so as to improve the selectivity of catalyst. Based on the preliminary understanding of selectivity improvement, it is necessary to systematically investigate the selective catalytic processes using combination of multiple strategies, thereby realizing the design of highly selective catalyst over reasonable time scales and space scales. (C) 2020, Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.