Combinatorial catalyst discovery

We believe that the successful application of combinatorial methods to the chemical industry could have similar benefits 1) an increase in the rate of catalyst innovation and 2) a decrease in commercialization cycle times. Because of this belief, UOP and SINTEF have developed their End-to-End combinatorial catalyst discovery system. This system includes the ability to perform all the critical catalyst processing operations combinatorially (Figure 1). We have validated each of these steps using commercially relevant catalyst examples. In addition, we have utilized the entire system to prepare and test catalysts for catalytic applications. 

Figure 1. Unit operations in our End-to-End combinatorial catalyst discovery system.

During the past three years, combinatorial tools and methods have received increasing amounts of attention as potentially enabling methodologies for the chemical industry. We have developed an integrated End-to-End combinatorial catalyst discovery system, which allows us to perform all the critical catalyst processing operations combinatorially. A critical component of this system is a combinatorial multiautoclave assembly, which can be used to explore hydrothermal space efficiently and effectively. Our recent results illustrate the applicability of this capability to both the discovery and scale-up of microporous solids. The expected impact of these combinatorial tools in new product commercialization and the chemical industry will be discussed. 

Catalyst Discovery The First Homogeneous Catalysts Derived from Combinatorial Technologies for a Variety of Cross-Coupling... 

Combinatorial-Parallel Approaches to Catalyst Discovery and Development... 

Gibb, Thomas, R. P., Jr., Primary Solid Hydrides Gilbertson, Scott R., Combinatorial-Parallel Approaches to Catalyst Discovery 3 315... 

The research described herein bears testimony to the fact that use of combinatorial protocols is becoming increasingly popular with researchers in the important field of chiral catalyst discovery. The majority of the above examples represent cases in which combinatorial approaches have led to the development of a new method in organic synthesis. There are numerous other disclosures involving optimization of established protocols that benefited from diversity-based approaches as well [23]. 

Colorimetric assays, with organometallic complexes, 1, 912 Combinatorial approaches, for alkene polymerization catalyst discovery, 11, 727 Complexation studies... 

Cong, P., Giaquinta, D., Guan, S., McFarland, E., Self, K., Turner, H., Weinberg, H., A combinatorial chemistry approach to oxidation catalyst discovery and optimization, in Ehrfeld, W., Rinard, I. H., Wegeng, R. S. (Eds.), Process Miniaturization 2nd International Conference on Microreaction Technology, IMRET 2, Topical Conf. Preprints, AIChE, New Orleans, 1998, 118-123. 

Contains new chapters describing recent developments in combinatorial technologies applied to catalyst discovery and biotechnology... 

Catalyst discovery research—metal oxides and supports, shape selective and hetero metal substituted molecular sieves, pillared clays, biomimetic, methan-otropic and other bio systems and combinatorial catalytic screening techniques, liquid phase homogeneous systems. 

Hoveyda AH. Catalyst discovery through combinatorial chemistry. Chem. biol. 1998 5 187-191. 

Combinatorial approaches for speeding up heterogeneous catalyst discovery, optimisation and scaling-up... 

The search for catalysts has many features in common with the search for biologically active compounds, most importantly pharmaceuticals In both cases, the aim is the discovery of a property, an effect. In classical pharmaceutical (or catalysis) research (Scheme 3, top), compound isolation and characterization precedes testing. As a consequence, a lot of effort may be invested on compounds that eventually do not show the desired properties (4,5). In the combinatorial approach, (Scheme 3, bottom) characterization comes after the discovery of a desired property, and it is limited to those compounds that show the desired property. As summarized in Scheme 3 (bottom), the key features of the combinatorial approach to catalyst discovery (and optimization) are (i) the generation of libraries of catalyst candidates, and (ii) the screening of the libraries for catalytic activity. Both aspects are dealt with in a general sense in Sections LB and I.C below. Section I.D summarizes the features specific for library generation and screening in the field of biomimetic oxidation catalysis. 

Snapper, M. L. Hoveyda, A. H. Combinatorial Approaches to Chiral Catalyst Discovery. In Combinatorial Chemistry, 2000 pp 433-455. Shimizu, K. D. Snapper, M. L. Hoveyda, A. H. Combinatorial Approaches. In Comprehensive Asymmetric Catalysis I-IH Jacobsen, E. N., Pfaltz, A., Yamamoto, H., Eds. Springer-Verlag Berlin, 1999 pp 1389-1399. 

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