by Prof. Tarik Chafik, FST Tangier, Morocco.
In the actual context of global warming there is an important need for innovation in technology solutions promoting low carbon emissions. This paves the way to new research area with cross-cutting applicability relevant to chemical-to-chemical reactions and chemical to-power processes. Engineering of efficient catalysts exhibiting high performance at lower operating temperatures, will help saving significant amounts of energy and reducing the carbon emissions.
Special attention is devoted to the development of non-noble metal catalysts material taking advantage of the available minerals such as clays with respect to their physicochemical and textural properties suitable for applications in catalysis. In recent years, clays attracted significant interest as support to transition metal oxides for efficient contaminants removal from drinking water. Clays served successfully as catalysts due to their chemical composition consisting mainly of aluminosilicates that might act as catalyst support as well as mixtures of several common compounds such as Fe2O3, MgO, K2O, usually considered as active phases and promoters contained in material available locally.
Recently, we demonstrated the interesting intrinsic catalytic performances of clays toward complete oxidation of air pollutants such as CO as well as saturated, unsaturated, oxygenated and aromatic hydrocarbons. Furthermore, we highlighted also an innovative aspect associated with the easy extrusion of clays based catalyst and related advantages over conventional packed bed reactors allowing not only reducing pressure drop but also preventing hot spots/cool zones within the reactor. This is beneficial with respect to heat transfer in case of energy sensitive reactions and could be of interest with respect to methane reforming with CO2, considered both as constituent of biogas and major greenhouse gases. This study has been carried out using an easily extruded honeycomb monolith catalyst based on appropriately modified and promoted local clays.
The primary results are promising and might be considered as starting point paving the way to valorization of low cost local resources in chemical processes with low carbon emissions.
Biography
Dr. Tarik Chafik received his PhD in Catalytic engineering processes from university of Lyon France with Prof. D. Bianchi (1993). He was Post doc researcher at University of Patras (Greece) with Prof. Verykios (1994) than he worked at National Institute for Resources and Environment (AIST, Tsukuba Japan) from 1995 to 1997. He was awarded as Fulbright visiting researcher at University California Berkeley (USA) in 1999 (with Prof. A. T. Bell). Prof. Chafik currently works as Group leader, Full Professor and Master courses coordiantor at the Faculty of Sciences and Technique of Tangier (Morocco), where he is teaching Thermodynamic, Chemical engineering, catalysis and atmospheric pollution control. He is, also, coordinator and member of several research projects dealing with sustainable development technologies such as those involving adsorbents and catalysts for air pollution control as well as materials for application in renewable energy. He holds 2 international patents and more 70 indexed publications (h index 19).
He was appointed as invited Professor at Alma Mater University of Bologna for research and teaching assignments within European Master Advanced Spectroscopy in Chemistry (2months) as well as University of Lille, France (1 month 2 times). He was several times invited lecturer at the universities in France, Spain, Portugal, Germany. Nominated by the Moroccan ministry for expertise of National teaching curriculum proposals within LMD “licence, master, doctorate” and requested by CNRST (Morocco) for various research projects examination. He Served as guest editor and reviewer for many National and international journals as well as jury president and member of many PhD thesis.
