Temporal Analysis of Products (TAP)—A Unique Catalyst Evaluation System with Submillisecond Time Resolution

The drive to develop new tools for surface analysis and catalyst evaluation is motivated in part by the need to enhance the rate of industrial heterogeneous catalyst development. Although a variety of model catalytic systems are known in considerable detail, the operation of many commercial catalysts remains an enigma and commercial catalyst development is still by and large a slow, painstaking process. This is particularly true for catalysts with poorly defined surfaces such as mixed metal oxides used in selective oxidation and ammoxidation. Because of the complexity of developing new metal oxide catalysts we began work directed toward improving the efficiency of the catalyst development process. The result of that work is a new catalyst evaluation technique which we call TAP (temporal analysis of products). This article describes the TAP experiment and illustrates with examples its utility in heterogeneous catalyst research.