Work Packages

The ambition of NoNoMeCat is to durably impact research in homogeneous catalysis by establishing and disseminating widely applicable tools and strategies to address the above-mentioned challenges. To this end, three areas of strategic importance have been identified as the focal points of the NoNoMeCat research effort:

	Oxidation Catalysis (WP1)
	Cross-Coupling (WP2)
	Catalysis for Energy (WP3)

The areas of WP1 and WP2 are at the heart of modern chemical manufacturing and present prototypical reaction types for the whole chemical industry. The direct impact the network can make is therefore large in these areas. WP3 represents a new area of research that has been identified as one of the foremost challenges to Europe and the world, i.e. the production of ‘clean’ energy.
Generic to all WPs is the iterative, cooperative, and interdisciplinary approach. The general starting point will be the promising catalytic activity that has been observed in the areas of WP1-3 with systems developed by the network partners. These catalytically active systems will be analysed by mechanistic and spectroscopic methods (including kinetics) to deduce likely reaction pathways. In parallel, synthetic variations and computational investigations will be conducted to propose reaction pathways and pin down the most probable modes of action. Generic patterns will be deduced, leading to predictions as to how the system may be optimized, and which modification will have what effect. Any emerging model will be verified synthetically to provide an understanding and incentives for refining the model. Simultaneously, mechanistic and kinetic work will probe the proposed reactivity pathways. Active systems will be modulated synthetically, thus altering the catalytic activity and providing refined details for computational optimization. These iterations will, after a few cycles, lead to optimized catalytic systems for which industrial application will be studied. To enhance collaborative efforts and topical integration within the WPs, each WP includes one collaborative ESR project tackling a key challenge in the field through a strong collaboration with all ESRs in the WP.

Work Packages