He went to Paris . . .

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He went to Paris . . . July 2004 A multimedia
presentation by Paul Matter
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Trip Summary
July 8th - Arrived in Paris for 2 hours then took
a train to Lyon July 8th 11th - Visited Lyon,
the IRC, and the IFP July 11th 17th - The 13th
ICC in Paris July 17th 19th - Visited Brugge,
Belgium July 19th 21st Visited Amsterdam, The
Netherlands July 22nd - Left from Paris for the
U.S.
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Troubles Speaking French
We arrived in France both hungry and tired. I
used my petit French vocabulary to ask how to get
to the train station. I learned that if I asked
a question in French that they would answer in
English, but if I asked a question in English,
they would answer in French. With the extensive
signage and my ability to ask simple French
questions, it was easy to get around. At the
train station we decided to get sandwiches. They
all come on a really long and skinny loaf of
bread (baguette). There were people all over
carrying these big loaves of bread around,
usually smiling. I tried to order something
simple in French 2 ham and cheese sandwiches.
The girl gave me a ham sandwich, and a cheese
sandwich. The ham looked like raw bacon, so we
split the cheese sandwich and ate the bread from
the other one. I tried to order lemonade, but
the girl suggested flavored water, so I took it.
It turned out to be peppermint flavored water.
Despite some initial hesitation due to the
similarity of the taste with mouthwash, I fell in
love with the drink. Not only does it quench
your thirst, but it also freshens your breath.
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Train ride
We took the TGV to Lyon. Here is what the French
countryside looks like while passing by at 200
mph (click on the picture to start the movie)
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Lyon Sites
Lyon was a pleasant, very French city situated
where the Rhone meets the Saone River. Here are
some of the sites
Square with lion statues and carousel. There
were lion statues all over the city, each painted
differently. I counted at least 13.
Church overlooking old Lyon. Old Lyon has a maze
of narrow passages between the streets, le
resistance used them to fight the German
occupation, I was told.
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Lyon Sites
We climbed to the top of the hill to see the old
Roman theater (built in the 1st century A.D.)
The theater, where they still have shows at night
during the summer.
My sister sitting on an old column in the ruins.
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Lyonnaises
The people of Lyon were very friendly and they
seemed to love Americans with the exception of
George Bush, although Fredric (seated below)
didnt think Bush is bad. Fahrenheit 9/11 opened
while we were there, they all loved it. There
were many narrow streets for foot traffic only,
that were lined with cafes and shops. One of the
café owners grabbed me, and made my sister and I
try the wine and champagne they were drinking. I
liked the Dom Perignon best. They were eager to
talk politics, and new more about U.S. politics
than most Americans. Besides the U.S., the
countries of Spain, Italy, and Brazil are popular
amongst the French. Whenever attractive girls
walked by the guys would yell, oo la la, oo la
la!. They could not recruit any one else to sit
with them other than my sister, myself, a girl
from Spain (Francesca), and an Italian (forgot
his name).
Kristen drinks a real Bellini apertif.
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IRC
There was some work to be done in Lyon. I
visited the Institute for the Research of
Catalysis (IRC), where they have around 30
professors and about 200 researchers from 3
universities altogether studying catalysts. The
labs and equipment looked similar to our stuff,
but below are some things I found interesting. I
didnt get pictures of their in-situ STM set-up
or the combinatorial catalyst testing reactors
with wells for 16 samples, but that was
interesting too.
A mass spec for analyzing products at the bottom
of the reactor with millisecond resolution. Made
in UW of St. Louis, the prof did his post-doc
there. He was a nice guy from Holland (Yves
Schurrman) who once backpacked across South
America.
On-line High Purity Liquid Chromatography. Just
like a G.C. only liquid.
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Lunchtime / IFP
After the tours they took us to lunch at the
IFP which is sort of a national lab for petroleum
research. Lunch lasted 2.5 hours, and the tables
didnt have chairs. One of the ladies from the
IRC convinced my to try the wine and I ended up
having about 4 or 5 glasses. She was nice,
although I cant remember her name. Her daughter
went to school at Georgia and lives in Paris now.
She was going to visit her in Paris the
following week, but said she wouldnt talk to me
if she saw me there, because she would be on
vacation and didnt want anything to do with the
conference. I also met a guy with an Irish
accent. I asked him if he was Irish and he
replied, Sacre bleu!. He was French (from
Lyon), but had lived in Dublin for 2 years. He
works for an Irish company and it is his job to
travel around France to see what people are
researching. Sounded like a cool job. After
lunch I slept through a couple presentations.
Yves said he tried to sleep, but complained that
the music on the videos was too loud. The
Irish/French guy said he slept okay. Next, we
toured the labs. Everything was brand new and
organized to the point of absurdity. They had a
lot of equipment for preparation of large
catalyst batches (up to 10 kg). The also had
automatic powder pelletizers and machines that
counted pellets and separated them by size. They
had lab scale bench top reactors all the way up
to pilot plants that were 1/10th the size of
refinery reactors. I dont think they cared much
about characterization there, just actvity
testing.
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IFP
I couldnt take pictures of everything at the IFP
(some areas were restricted), but here is some
cool stuff I saw
6-port adsorption instrument. They also had a
6-port pre-treatment unit.
Small gas feed set-up with on-line GC for
time-on-stream testing. Has 4 separate reactors,
each with its own feed that can be humidified.
Everything is fully automated, and is controlled
by a computer on the left.
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Back to Paris

After a couple good meals and a festival next
to the Rhone, it was time to leave Lyon and
return to Paris via the TGV. Our first night in
Paris we were greeted with the opening reception
for the conference. This included all the wine
you can drink and hors d'oeuvres, although it was
difficult to find anything with meat,as it was
mostly sweets and Matt Yungs favorite, brie
cheese. Fortunately I scouted out the conference
center before the banquet and found an
alternative entrance that saved us from waiting
in the mob to get in. I only saw one single
filed line in France, Erdal (Dr. Ozkans husband)
was in it waiting for wine when my sister and I
cut ahead of them without realizing it until we
had our wine. Unfortunately I didnt really meet
new people at the banquet, probably since my
sister was there to talk to. I did get to talk
to Yeping Cai an alumni from our group who works
at SudChemie. Erdal also hung out with us since
Dr. Ozkan kept talking to people he didnt know.
Yeping and myself, just chillin
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Sir John Meurig Thomas
One of the most interesting people I met was
Sir John Meurig Thomas, his friends call him Sir
Thomas. He is a prof at Cambridge and a real
English knight (Queen Elizabeth knighted him in
1991, just like Paul McCartney and Mic Jagger).
He liked to ask questions after all the talks. I
heard him ask about 5 questions, each of which
lasted an average of 10 minutes and included the
history of the technique he was asking about and
how he knew or worked with the person who
developed the technique. He also pronounced
methane like Rick does, meethane. I wanted to
ask him for his autograph or get my picture taken
with him, but I thought that might annoy him. He
was at the talks by the de Jong group that I
found myself magnetized too.
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de Jong Group from Holland (friends with Sir
Thomas)
The de Jong group was the first to start using
3-D TEM for catalysis (the 12th ICC). Their
presentations were the most visually awing. They
also did some innovative stuff with nano-fibers.
Their first paper I saw was on making fish-bone
nano-fibers and then putting different oxygen
functional groups on the surface (usually using
acids) to see the effects on the properties on
the fiber as a support for metal particles.
They did a lot of characterization of the Ni/SiO2
precursor to the carbon fibers. Different
preparation techniques (sol-gel, co-precipiation,
wet impregnation, or incipient wetness) led to
different properties, and sometimes strange
adsorption/desorption characteristics resulted.
3D-TEM results with stunning images showed three
examples where particles had non-ideal
dispersions that varied from preparation
technique to technique
Egg-shell covering can occur with incipient
wetness
Filling of bottom of U-shapes silica pores with
Ni (wet imp.)
Blocking of pores with particles
All these morphologies can be recognized from
3D-TEM. If you have unexplainable adsorption
results or strange differences in properties that
arent explainable by normal characterization,
you may want to keep this in mind. (see Zieze,
Applied Cat. A v260, 2004)
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More Nano Stuff
I saw many other interesting presentations.
Resasco from Oklahoma (www.ou.edu/engineering/nano
tube) used catalysts to prepare SWNTs
(nanotubes). They used Fe, Ni, and Co supported
by MgO. Everything could then be dissolved with
HCl leaving behind the carbon. The group then
found that certain strands of DNA could be used
to separate the tubes from their bundles. Some
strands were even selective for specific types of
SWNTs. Reshetenko et al. from Russia looked at
the plane angle of nano-fibers prepared from
methane using different catalysts on alumina.
Observations I found interesting include the
effect of particle size on the product. They saw
that 100-150 nm particles got encapsulated, while
particles in the range of 25-45 nm worked best
for fiber growth. Different catalysts had
different fish-bone angles. There was also a
poster by Haller at Yale on a BJH method to get
carbon nano-tube size distribution that I want to
look into, although Im not sure if it is any
different than BJH particles size distribution.
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Other Stuff
Co-precipitation - A German group presented on
the effects of aging Cu/ZnO catalyst precipitates
before washing with water. The group showed
stark differences in activity and
characterization depending on the aging time. In
situ Conductivity A very interesting technique
that I have dreamt of but never realized how to
carry out is testing the electrical conductivity
of catalysts while running a reaction or various
treatments. Jean-Marc Millets group (friends
with Dr.Ozkan) presented data on such an
experiment. Dr. Ozkan might have the
experimental details, but we should definitely
have the necessary equipment in our lab if we can
design a reactor set-up. Kuhns Experiments The
Duprez group who brought us some interesting
papers on spillover effects reported an
experiment that John would like. They took the
IR spectra of a sample while performing an
isotopic O16 to O18 switch. On a Ce/ZrO2 sample
peaks were reported at 1126 cm-1 for O216, 1094
cm-1 for O16O18, and 1062 cm-1 for O218. On some
samples the mixed species didnt form, but the
addition of Pt or Rh lead to the mixed species
formation.
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UV-Raman set-up
Stair et al. from the U.S. (I think
Northwestern), characterized a coking reaction in
situ using UV Raman. A schematic of the set-up
is shown here The technique could
differentiate between poly-ethylene type (1-D
carbon), poly-aromatic (1-D carbon chain), and 2D
(graphite sheets) that formed on catalysts.
Laser
sample

Porous disk
EM shaker
Flow in
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Sites of Paris
There was more to see in Paris than the
conference . . .
Arc de Triomphe
Sacre Coeur
Notre Dame
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Dance Party on the River
Monday night they had a dance party on a barge on
the Seine. We met Ben and Florencia there. They
both go to school in Munich, but Valencia is from
Argentina. Ben is German so he doesnt like to
dance, but Florencia is really good. Florencia
got a hold of my camera and took the following
pictures
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Dance Party on the River
The bottom picture shows the River Seine where
our barge was docked. It also has a depiction of
the cobblestone streets of Paris.
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Bastille Day
Wednesday was Frances independence day. Every
13 and 14 year old boy in the entire city was
throwing firecrackers and M80s at the tourists.
I just wanted to stay inside until the day was
over, but fortunately we made it out safely to
see a pretty cool show at the Eiffel tower.
Click on the picture to see it.
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The Louvre
The Louvre was open for free on Bastille day,
this is the most famous museum in France where
they keep the Mona Lisa and a lot of cool statues.
Headless Scholar
Troll
Psyche and Cupid
Hercules
Aphrodite
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Last Mango in Paris
We also went to the Pablo Picasso museum,
although it had a limited number of his
paintings, as I only recognized 3 or 4. I stared
at this one the longest to try to figure out what
was going on. Its titled, The Painter and His
Assistant. I ate a fruit bowl for lunch there.
Although the bread, wine, and cheese were really
good, I dont think Ill eat fruit in a foreign
country again, except Brazil maybe.
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More sites of Paris
The Eiffel tower from atop Montmarte, where we
watched the fireworks and looked at artwork.
Our own personal bidet, its to wash your
backside, mate.
The U.S. gave Paris a small version of the statue
of liberty as a thank you present for the real
one.
Paris is home to the worlds smallest cars. You
can park them side-ways in a normal parallel
parking spot.
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Off to Brugge
Home of the worlds smallest gothic window
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Sites of Brugge
Brugge is a medieval Belgian town with big
churches, a canal, windmills, lace shops,
waffles, ice cream, tourists on bikes, breweries,
and restaurants everywhere.
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Consumables of Brugge
If you like beer and mussels, then youd like
Brugge
before
Heres the chocolate shop where I found the
truffles for my research group.
after
Other specialties include chocolate, waffles, and
ice cream.
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Next Stop Amsterdam
And you thought the chocolate shop in Brugge was
raunchy . . .
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Amsterdam
Just kidding, I didnt take many pictures in
Amsterdam. We had a safe in our room so I
decided to leave my camera locked up. The area
where we stayed was pretty nice (Leidseplein
square), and it was still within walking distance
of the shady stuff that you have to see while
your there. There are mostly a lot of bars and
restaraunts in the area we stayed, with a couple
coffee shops. We walked to the red light
district one night, but I didnt partake in
anything. There were other things to see in
Amsterdam, like the Ann Frank house, the canals,
and even the famous Hard Rock café which has a
patio on the canal. We ate lunch there one day,
but unfortunately it was raining, so we sat
inside. There was also some chemical engineering
to learn about there . . .
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Bioreactors
We toured a plant where they use micro-organisms
to carry out a fermentation process to produce a
consumable delicious beverage.
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Au revoir to Europe
Alas, it was time to leave. I finally caught my
first glimpse of the North Sea while we waited
for our train back to Paris, and our flight back
to reality.
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The End
La Fin
Het einde
Das Ende