Thomas E. Müller is a German chemist and an academic. He is Professor of Carbon source and Conversion at Ruhr-Universität Bochum.
Müller's research focus is in the area of chemical engineering and spans the fields of organometallic and polymer chemistry to reaction and process engineering. He has worked on the development of methods for the production of organic commodity chemicals and polymers, and has conducted research on catalytic conversions such as the conversion of alkenes and alkynes to amines by hydroamination. More recently, his work has focused on the field of carbon capture and utilization (CCU), sustainability, hydrogenation of multifunctional molecules and high-performance polymers.
Müller has authored and co-authored numerous peer-reviewed research papers.
Education
Müller enrolled at the Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU) of Munich in 1986, and received an intermediate diploma in chemistry. Following that, he received a diploma in chemistry from ETH Zurich in 1991. Subsequently, he completed his PhD in noble metal complexes and clusters from Imperial College London in 1995, and was appointed as a Research Fellow by the University of Sussex to work on fullerene chemistry, allotropes of carbon and arrays of carbon nanotubes. Later, he accomplished habilitation in 2003 from the Technical University of Munich, focusing on chemical process development, reaction engineering and catalysis, and conceived innovative composite and nanostructured materials mainly for use as catalytically active materials.
Career
Following his habilitation in 2003, Müller started his academic career as a lecturer at the Technical University of Munich. He held a brief appointment in 2005 as an associate professor of Applied Chemistry at the University of Singapore. After joining Bayer MaterialScience AG in 2007 he built the CAT Catalytic Center as part of the industry-academia collaboration with RWTH Aachen University. He was the Head of CAT Catalytic Centre (CAT) from 2007 to 2015. After the carve-out, he continued as catalyst expert at Covestro AG. Later, in 2018 he changed as a professor to Rheinische Fachhochschule Köln for a year. Since 2019, he has been the professor of the chair Carbon Sources and Conversion at Ruhr-Universität Bochum.
Research
Müller's research is focused on catalysis, with a particular emphasis on chemical reaction engineering, polyurethanes and high-performance polymers. He has been issued patents on his research on the development of polymeric materials such as polyether thio-carbonate polyols.
Organometallic chemistry
During his early research, Müller worked on organometallic chemistry with an interest in the catalytic hydroamination of alkenes and alkynes. His research on the catalytic activity of transition metals in the hydroamination of alkynes revealed that [Cu(CH3CN)4]PF6 and group 12 metals salts have a particularly high catalytic activity and that a d8 or d10 electronic configuration is present in all catalytically active complexes. In another research, he analyzed the palladium-catalyzed cyclization of 6-aminohex-1-yne and observed the organometallic complex [Pd(triphos)](CF3SO3)2 to have the highest catalytic activity and also mentioned that ion-exchanged zeolites are at least as active in the hydroamination of 6-aminohex-1-yne as the corresponding homogeneous catalysts. Later, he observed that the presence of protons drastically increases the rate of hydroamination reactions catalyzed by Lewis acidic metals and that supported Rh(I), Pd(II) and Zn(II) complexes have particularly high catalytic activity and selectivity.
Apart from finding new catalysts for the hydroamination of alkenes and alkynes, Müller has also determined the X-ray crystal structure of the transition-metal catalyst [PdCl(triphos)](CF3SO3) that is active for the intramolecular hydroamination of alkynes and developed novel reaction systems for hydroamination reactions, such as a liquid–liquid two-phase catalytic system which showed efficient results.