UFO chamber mini reactor

The UFO chamber mini reactor is a high pressure reaction chamber (up to 50 bar) for conducting operando studies. It has been used to research the carbide formation on an iron-based catalysts.

In-situ XPS (left) and SXRD (right) performed at different temperature, pressure and gas feed mixture, from Shipilin et al. 2022 [23], CC BY (Open access article).

Availablity: On load from DESY Nanolab

Contact: DESY Nanolab 's Prof. Dr. Andreas Stierle

Sample environment

This high pressure reaction chamber is more fully described on the DESY Nanolab website: DESY NanoLab sample environments

Catalysis study

In their study, Shipilin et al. studied the carbide formation on an iron-based catalyst. They used in-situ X-Ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy (XPS) and in-situ SXRD with increasing temperature up to 350 °C at various pressure levels (85, 550 and 700 mbar). The UFO mini reactor chamber was used for SXRD only. The UFO chamber was vacuumed first, and then pressure was controlled by an inlet gas flow available on the UFO chamber. The study enabled an understanding of which crystalline iron carbides were forming at different temperatures as well as their dependences on the pressure and gas feed composition.

The experiments where performed at the Swedish Materials Science beamlines, P21.2 branch, (for SXRD) and the P22 (for XPS) beamline at PETRA III.

For more information about the research see: M. Shipilin, D. Degerman, P. Lömker, C.M. Goodwin, G.L.S. Rodrigues, M. Wagstaffe, J. Gladh, H.-Y. Wang, A. Stierle, C. Schlueter, L.G.M. Pettersson, A. Nilsson, P. Amann, In Situ Surface-Sensitive Investigation of Multiple Carbon Phases on Fe(110) in the Fischer–Tropsch Synthesis, ACS Catal. 12 (2022) 7609–7621. doi.org/10.1021/acscatal.2c00905