Fluorescent-Probe Characterization for Pore-Space Mapping with Single-Particle Tracking.

Porous solids often contain complex pore networks with pores of various sizes. Tracking individual fluorescent probes as they diffuse through porous materials can be used to characterize pore networks at tens of nanometers resolution. However, understanding the motion behavior of fluorescent probes in confinement is crucial to reliably derive pore network properties.

Visualizing defects and pore connectivity within metal-organic frameworks by X-ray transmission tomography.

Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOFs) have the potential to change the landscape of molecular separations in chemical processes owing to their ability of selectively binding molecules. Their molecular sorting properties generally rely on the micro- and meso-pore structure, as well as on the presence of coordinatively unsaturated sites that interact with the different chemical species present in the feed. In this work, we show a first-of-its-kind tomographic imaging of the crystal morphology of a metal-organic framework by means of transmission X-ray microscopy (TXM), including a detailed data reconstruction and processing approach.

Plastic Waste Conversion over a Refinery Waste Catalyst.

Polypropylene (PP) makes up a large share of our plastic waste. We investigated the conversion of PP over the industrial Fluid Catalytic Cracking catalyst (FCC-cat) used to produce gasoline from crude oil fractions. We studied transport limitations arising from the larger size of polymers compared to the crude oil-based feedstock by testing the components of this catalyst separately.