Towards designing pillared clays for catalysis

Recent advances in tailoring pillared clays (PILCs) for catalytic applications are reviewed. Emphasis is placed on the variety of reactions beyond acid catalysis: cracking, dehydrogenations, oxidations and particularly clean technology applications, especially De–NOx, which can be carried out in PILCs. Further, recent structure determinations via SANS (small angle neutron scattering) methods have allowed, for the first time, determination of inter-pillar distances, permitting construction of pore geometries. This has also been found possible for the related restructured clays and the SANS-determined structures of K10 and Mg-HMO are reported. The latter is the first of a new type of mildly restructured montmorillonites important in industrially relevant alkenylation reactions for producing key organic intermediates. Implications of these recent advances for eventually designing PILCs for specific catalytic applications are discussed.