A synergistic approach was made to develop a highly stable and carbon resistant catalyst system based on cobalt and nickel supported over modified mesoporous silica for the dry reforming of methane (DRM). Modified mesoporous silica is prepared by a hydrothermal method, and the total Co & Ni composition is taken at around 5% by using the deposition-precipitation technique. CO₂ reforming with methane was performed at 400–800 °C under atmospheric pressure as well as at a pressure of 1 MPa, keeping the CH₄/CO₂ ratio equal to unity. The catalyst assembly before and after the reaction was thoroughly characterized by a wide range of analytical techniques including N₂ physisorption, XRD, TPR, TPO, TPH, XPS, SEM, TEM, elemental mapping, TG-DTG. The physicochemical characterization results confirmed the homogeneous distribution of nanosized metal particles into the hexagonal framework of modified silica, which plays a vital role towards a stronger metal support interaction that renders carbon deposition upon the active metal surface as well as avoids metal sintering at higher temperatures. At the same time, the coexistence of nanosized Co and Ni into the mesopores produced a synergy which provides better stability without any deactivation at high pressure reaction conditions. In situ DRIFT analysis evidenced that the reaction proceeds over these catalysts through an initial pathway in which both methane and carbon dioxide initially dissociate over the metal along with a bifunctional pathway in which methane dissociates over the active metal and carbon dioxide activated over the basic support surface via a formate intermediate. Density Functional Theory (DFT) calculations were also performed and further support the proposed mechanism from DRIFT studies.

A boron- and nitrogen-co-doped mesoporous carbon (B_xCN) material with a hierarchical pore structure has been synthesized from a new boron precursor via a nanocasting approach.

Herein, we report the synthesis of a new class of traditional fluorophore-free dual pH- and thermo-responsive fluorescent copolymer through sequence-controlled copolymerization of rationally designed monomers. The N-substituted maleimide monomer bearing a diethylene oxide side-chain, (N-(methoxy diethylene glycol) maleimide, M1), was copolymerized with a tert-butyl carbamate (Boc)-protected leucine appended styrenic monomer (M2) to obtain well-defined copolymers with perfectly alternating sequences of M1 and M2. The as-synthesized copolymers displayed bright-blue fluorescence in organic solvents. After Boc-group expulsion, the copolymers showed dual pH- and thermo-responsiveness, they retained their luminescence properties in organic solvents, and also showed pH/thermo-tunable fluorescence activity in water. The origin of the fluorescence in the copolymers was ascertained using density functional theory (DFT), where we observed that the “through-space” π–π interaction between the benzene ring and the neighbouring carbonyl group of the maleimide unit is responsible for the unexpected fluorescence in the alternating copolymer.

Fock space multireference coupled-cluster (FSMRCC) method emerged as an efficient tool to describe the electronic structure of nearly degenerate cases. Development of linear response has been one of the challenging problems in FSMRCC due to the multiple-root nature of the effective Hamiltonian. A response from any of the roots would span the space for getting the properties. Hence, all roots perturbed by the external field would proliferate the excited states. We recently developed the FSMRCC method for the efficient evaluation of analytic response properties using a constrained variation approach. In this paper, we present analytic dipole moments and polarizabilities of H2O, O3, and CH+ molecules in low-lying excited states along with brief discussion of singlet triplet decoupling of (1,1) sector of FSMRCC resulting from spin adaptation.