Seminar Xènia García

On Friday 30^th of November 2018, Xènia García, research member of NEMEN group, presented her latest results during the seminar “Conventional Pd/CeO₂ vs CeO₂/Pd inverse catalysts for CO oxidation”.

Xènia detailed the synthetic procedures used for the preparation of Pd/CeO₂ and CeO₂/Pd catalysts. The former was prepared by Incipient Wetness Impregnation (IWI) and Atomic Layer Deposition (ALD) while the latter was synthesized by ALD. The importance of the non-conventional oxide/metal configuration for fundamental studies in catalysis was higlighted explaining the advantages of ALD, which enables an accurate control of the material thickness.

The near ambient pressure x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (NAP-XPS) results performed in 4 scenarios of temperature and gas presence revealed that cerium and palladium of the convencional Pd/CeO₂ catalyst prepared by IWI appeared more oxidized than the samples prepared by ALD and, consequently, with higher ability to transfer oxygen atoms and thus to oxidize the CO.

Xènia García

Xènia García graduated in Nanoscience and Nanotechnology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and carried out a Master degree of Applied Chemistry of Materials at the Chemistry Department of Universitat de Barcelona, where she completed her Master Thesis in collaboration with the Institut de Química Avançada de Catalunya (IQAC-CSIC). She started her PhD at Jordi Llorca’s NEMEN research group in April 2017.