Principles and Practice of Environmental Catalysis

Catalog description

This course is for senior undergraduate students in Engineering, Physics, and Chemistry, who are interested in materials, energy, and environment. This course is an introduction to the fundamentals of heterogeneous catalysis, aiming to explain the phenomenon of catalysis on a conceptual level. Kinetics, being the tool to investigate and describe catalytic reactivity as it expresses itself in a reactor, plays an important role in this course. Also reaction rate theory, providing the formalism to relate reaction rates to molecular structure of reacting species, will be described extensively. Students will also have the opportunity to learn about catalytic surfaces, as well as tools to study them. The last part of the course will serve to illustrate catalysis in practice, to give the students an understanding of how catalysis is applied. This course is dual listed with CE 516.