Related Articles

A big thanks to the teams for acknowledging our ETHZ SwissCat+ support in their recently published work:

• external page 109Ag NMR chemical shift as a descriptor for Brønsted acidity from molecules to materials†

^{Abstract: "Molecular-level understanding of the acid/base properties of heterogeneous catalysts requires the development of selective spectroscopic probes to establish structure–activity relationships. In this work we show that substituting the surface protons in oxide supports by isolobal N-heterocyclic carbene (NHC) Ag cations and measuring their 109Ag nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) signatures enables to probe the speciation and to evaluate the corresponding Brønsted acidity of the substituted OH surface sites. Specifically, a series of silver N-heterocyclic carbene (NHC) Ag(I) complexes of general formula [(NHC)AgX] are synthesized and characterized, showing that the 109Ag NMR chemical shift of the series correlates with the Brønsted acidity of the conjugate acid of X− (i.e., HX), thus establishing an acidity scale based on 109Ag NMR chemical shift. The methodology is then used to evaluate the Brønsted acidity of the OH sites of representative oxide materials using Dynamic Nuclear Polarization (DNP-)enhanced solid-state NMR spectroscopy."}

• external page Accelerated exploration of heterogeneous CO2 hydrogenation catalysts by Bayesian-optimized high-throughput and automated experimentation

^{Highlights:
• Experimental Bayesian optimization of CO2-to-methanol heterogeneous catalysts
• Automated and high-throughput synthesis and testing of 144 catalysts in 6 weeks
• Significant improvement of the catalyst’s performances in 5 generations
• The method can be applied to other chemistries and reactions}