oa Editorial [Hot Topic: High Throughput Applications in Green Chemistry (Guest Editors: Alfred Hagemeyer and Anthony Volpe, Jr)]

As populations increase and economic growth, industrialization, and modernization spread throughout the world, Green Chemistry is emerging as a subject of utmost importance. Some of its most significant and diverse applications include the development of chemical processes that are more energy efficient and environmentally sound, save valuable raw materials, control emissions, and produce less hazardous byproducts. World energy demand is rapidly growing and is expected to increase nearly 50% by 2035, driven mostly by growth in emerging markets such as China and India as well as Russia and Brazil. The world's population has more than doubled since 1950 and it is projected to increase another 40% by 2050. The industrial sector, which uses more energy globally than any other end-use sector, is currently consuming about 50% of the world's total delivered energy, and it is expected that this number will grow dramatically in the future. Worldwide, projected industrial energy consumption will grow from 184 quadrillion Btu in 2007 to 262 quadrillion Btu in 2035 (EIA). The daily consumption of crude oil could reach 105 million barrels per day in 2030. This ever growing energy demand has the potential to have a severe negative impact on global society if it is not addressed. As an example, the EIA forecasts energyrelated emissions of carbon dioxide will jump by 43%, from 29.7 billion tons in 2007 to 42.4 billion tons in 2035. Most industrial chemical processes operate at high temperatures and/or pressures. Therefore, their energy consumption is very high when compared, for example, to biological systems. To illustrate, the worldwide fertilizer demand from the Haber-Bosch process corresponded to 110 million tons of ammonia in 2002 and utilized approximately 1% of the global energy production in that year. Catalysts render chemical processes more selective and energy-efficient and are employed in the production of more than 90% of all chemical products. Hence catalysts add significant value to the productivity and efficiency of chemical processes. It is estimated that about 20 to 50% of the energy consumption by the chemical industry can be saved for current processes by the improvement of commercial catalysts as well as through the development of novel catalytic systems. This will be a critical contributor to reduce global energy demand to a minimum. Green catalysis comprises homogeneous, heterogeneous, and biological catalysis. In this Hot Topic issue we focus on heterogeneous chemical catalysis which is the most widely used and longest established catalyst type in the chemical industry. Simultaneously, we focus on high-throughput synthesis and screening methodologies for catalyst research and development, which have proven to be very useful to accelerate applications of new and optimized materials in chemical catalysis. They have also resulted in an increase in the probability of technical success due to the larger experimental space that can be scanned more rapidly and efficiently. The design of an integrated workflow consisting of synthesis, characterization, screening and data management is the key factor here. Diverse aspects of fundamental as well as applied high throughput techniques are covered in this issue including hardware/equipment, catalyst library synthesis and characterization, reaction screening, and data mining by neural networks. Articles from both academia and industry make this Hot Topic issue well balanced, with applications ranging from optimization of established industrial catalysts to the discovery of new materials and the development of innovative reactor concepts (advanced Temkin reactor, small scale parallel film reactor). Included are detailed contributions covering commodity chemicals produced by continuous flow gas phase reactions (phthalic anhydride, vinyl acetate monomer), and fine chemicals usually synthesized in liquid phase batch processes. The potential of novel catalytic materials (Ionic Liquids, Metal Organic Framework materials applied to CO2 adsorption, transition-metal-free epoxidation catalysts) are also presented. The analysis of multiparameter space is shown to represent a new way of probing reaction networks.....