Solid acidic catalysis is an area of research with many industrial applications. In particular, heterogeneous catalysts are appreciated for the ease at which they can be removed from a reaction mixture, compared to traditional acid catalysts such as HCl which are hard to remove from a reaction product and are environmentally difficult to dispose as waste. This project will consider the zeolite chabazite (CHA), a structure of silica and oxygen containing regular pores whose acidity can be controlled via the addition of group 3 metals. This allows the fine tuning of the acidity of chabazite based on what metals are added and in what ratios to create zeolites with very particular functions. The acidity of these structures will be measured by calculation of the Fukui function indicating the sites which are more susceptible to nucleophilic/electrophilic attack. The trends then formed from these calculations as the doped metal increases in atomic size will be evaluated.
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