How Do You Collect Data for Your Catalysis Research?

When you need the acid-site density of a catalyst or an adsorption energy for a catalytic intermediate, what’s your approach?

If you’re like most of us, you have to choose between measuring/computing the data yourself and a slow, manual literature search for the information. Finding specific research data in the literature is often challenging and contextual, and applying it to a new study often means hand-compiling data from multiple journal articles.

In the ChemCatBio Data Hub project, we are working to change that with our Catalyst Property Database (CPD). The CPD collects catalyst-centric data into a centralized, searchable location to make it much easier to find. In the CPD, you can search detailed metadata, such as material compositions and methods, directly rather than searching and mining journal article texts.

By making published catalyst data much easier to find and apply, we aim to enable benchmarking and advanced data science applications in catalysis while reducing duplication of effort. The CPD, which initially focuses on computed adsorption energies for intermediates on catalytic surfaces from peer-reviewed journal articles, was released in 2020 with the support of the U.S. Department of Energy Bioenergy Technologies Office and is opening this fall to external user contributions. The database is uniquely suited to catalyst development in biomass conversion, as it was designed specifically to handle complex adsorbates such as those found in biomass vapor streams. These features also make it useful in a wide range of chemical transformations.

Join us for a webinar on October 13 to learn more about goals and future plans for the CPD, applications, searching the database, and contributing your data.

Let’s improve how we use data and accelerate catalysis research!

Kurt Van Allsburg, kurt.vanallsburg@nrel.gov

Carrie Farberow, carrie.farberow@nrel.gov

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