Seminarium "Teoria i Modelowanie Nanostruktur"

First, I will provide some introduction to the catalysis processes, just explaining the most important concepts and stressing the meaning of the field in science and economy. Next, I will describe the present activities searching for non-metallic catalysts. Finally, I will describe our ab initio molecular dynamic studies in the framework of the density functional theory on catalytic role of graphene for the chemical reactions leading to the dehydrogenation of methane. The energetics of the studied processes will be compared to analogous reactions on the surface of copper and nickel. I conclude this talk by demonstrating how our findings explain the growth of graphene monolayer on metals in chemical vapour deposition growth process.