Professor Raimund Horn and PhD candidate Diego Espinoza from the Institute of Chemical Reaction Engineering at Hamburg University of Technology introduced new methods for intra-reactor diagnostic measurements at the conference in Weimar.

The topic of Diego´s poster was "Spatially Resolved Elemental Analysis of Catalysts in a Fixed-Bed Reactor by Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS) ". The goal of the project is to introduce a novel characterization technique in the field of heterogeneous catalysis. LIBS has the potential to provide insight into the distribution of promotors, poisons, and active metals, which are key elements commonly found in industrial catalysts.

In an oral presentation “Iso-potential Operando DRIFTS: Measuring Adsorbate Profiles inside Catalytic Reactors”, Professor Raimund Horn presented a novel concept to perform Operando spectroscopy inside catalytic reactors. This new concept opens the possibility to couple a variety of spectroscopic and microscopic methods (e.g. DRIFTS, XRD, EPR, UV/Vis, Fluorescence, XAS, SEM, TEM) in an optimized way with catalytic reactors of arbitrary shape and size.