Techniques for Fabricating Nanoscale Catalytic Circuits.

This paper describes the development of a new technique, atomic beam deposition (ABD), for the fabrication of catalysts with different active sites capable of catalyzing different chemical reactions. Using ABD, submonolayer amounts of Te and Cu atoms were deposited on vanadyl pyrophosphate (VPO) catalyst particles, and precise non-steady-state kinetic characterization was performed using the temporal analysis of products (TAP) reactor immediately following deposition. Results from TAP Knudsen pulse response experiments determine if small changes in the metal surface composition would produce detectable changes in catalytic properties. Partial oxidation of 1-butene to furan was used as the test reaction. Furthermore, this paper also demonstrates the sensitivity of the TAP reactor by measuring oxygen uptake on a single 350 μm diameter polycrystalline Pt particle packed in a bed with 100,000 inert quartz particles of similar dimensions. The Pt experiments demonstrate the precise manipulation of surface oxygen content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]