We are excited to welcome the new 2025-2026 in-person program!
Professor Yuriy Román will be giving a talk at our next in-person meeting of the semester.
Meeting details:
Date/Time: Wednesday, November 19th at 6 pm
Location: Columbia Faculty House, Ivy Lounge Room, 1st Floor
64 Morningside Dr, New York, NY 10027
Please RSVP here!
Catalysis has long relied on conventional handles such as temperature, pressure, and concentration to accelerate chemical reactions. Across biology and electrochemistry, electric fields provide an additional parameter to control rates. Enzymes exploit strong, oriented fields within their active sites to stabilize intermediates and accelerate turnover, while in electrochemistry, interfacial polarization dictates electron and proton transfer rates. In heterogeneous thermochemical catalysis, little is known about these effects, yet they may offer new opportunities to control reactivity.
In this talk, I will describe our group’s efforts to harness electric fields to promote thermochemical reactions. For many electrochemical half-reactions, varying the applied potential accelerates rates by driving rate-controlling proton-coupled electron transfer (PCET) steps. We hypothesized that if an elementary PCET step were embedded within a thermochemical reaction, its strong potential dependence could be leveraged to enhance the overall rate. Because interfacial PCET involves proton exchange across the electric double layer, we anticipated that Brønsted acid catalysis, governed by proton transfer, would be particularly susceptible to polarization.
First, I will show how spontaneous interfacial fields at conductive particles dispersed in liquid media can measurably modulate turnover rates. Next, I will discuss how applied potentials lead to dramatic rate promotion in acid-catalyzed alcohol dehydration, accelerating rates by up to five orders of magnitude. Spectroscopic and kinetic analyses reveal that this acceleration arises from a field-driven increase in the population of reactive intermediates prior to the rate-determining step, providing a mechanistic basis for log-linear rate scaling with potential. Finally, I will highlight our development of polarized slurry reactors, which extend these principles from 2D electrodes to 3D catalyst slurries, enabling rate enhancements under conditions more suitable for scale-up. Our studies establish electric fields as a powerful, mechanistically grounded, and scalable lever to control thermochemical reactions, opening new opportunities for process intensification and catalyst design.
In this talk, I will describe our group’s efforts to harness electric fields to promote thermochemical reactions. For many electrochemical half-reactions, varying the applied potential accelerates rates by driving rate-controlling proton-coupled electron transfer (PCET) steps. We hypothesized that if an elementary PCET step were embedded within a thermochemical reaction, its strong potential dependence could be leveraged to enhance the overall rate. Because interfacial PCET involves proton exchange across the electric double layer, we anticipated that Brønsted acid catalysis, governed by proton transfer, would be particularly susceptible to polarization.
First, I will show how spontaneous interfacial fields at conductive particles dispersed in liquid media can measurably modulate turnover rates. Next, I will discuss how applied potentials lead to dramatic rate promotion in acid-catalyzed alcohol dehydration, accelerating rates by up to five orders of magnitude. Spectroscopic and kinetic analyses reveal that this acceleration arises from a field-driven increase in the population of reactive intermediates prior to the rate-determining step, providing a mechanistic basis for log-linear rate scaling with potential. Finally, I will highlight our development of polarized slurry reactors, which extend these principles from 2D electrodes to 3D catalyst slurries, enabling rate enhancements under conditions more suitable for scale-up. Our studies establish electric fields as a powerful, mechanistically grounded, and scalable lever to control thermochemical reactions, opening new opportunities for process intensification and catalyst design.
In memoriam
John Byrne
John Byrne, a long serving director and treasurer for the NYCS, sadly passed away on August 10, 2022. John’s wife, Susan, suggested that because of John’s dedication and love for NYCS, that it would be fitting that if friends and colleagues wanted to make a donation in John’s name, one favorite cause of John’s would be to support the NYCS work.
.png)
Who we are
The Catalysis Society of Metropolitan New York (CSNY) is a non-profit organization founded in 1958 to promote and encourage the growth and development of the science of catalysis in the New Jersey and Metro New York areas. CSNY is a local chapter of the North American Catalysis Society (NACS).
We organize 7 monthly professional dinner seminar meetings of scientists - to report, discuss, and exchange information and viewpoints in the field of catalysis. We also organize an all-day Annual Symposium in the spring which features lectures from distinguished researchers and a poster session presented by university students working in the catalysis area.
Our Sponsors
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.gif)
.png)
