Webinar: From Project to Platform: New Resources on PSDI – Session 5

Registration link: https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_vaiecs9ETrKM3WsOV1EC1w

PSDI is pleased to launch a new webinar series entitled “From Project to Platform: New Resources on PSDI”. This series aims to showcase the high-quality tools and resources developed through the funding call 2025, introduce them to a broader community, and foster engagement with relevant user groups.  

Abstract

Kinetic mechanisms are essential for understanding, modelling and optimising reacting systems, yet they are often difficult to access, reproduce and reuse. Mechanisms are frequently distributed across journal articles, supplementary files and bespoke software formats, with limited standardisation and incomplete documentation of species, reactions, thermodynamic data and provenance.  These barriers hinder reproducibility, comparison between models and the development of reliable digital workflows in reaction engineering.

This webinar introduces ORKiM, an open-access repository designed to support the publication, curation and reuse of kinetic mechanisms. ORKiM provides a structured platform through which researchers can share mechanisms together with their associated metadata, supporting transparency, interoperability and long-term accessibility.  The repository aims to promote community-driven development of kinetic mechanisms and models and facilitate their integration with simulation, mechanism-generation and microkinetic-analysis tools.

The webinar will present a case study on alkene oligomerisation in acidic zeolites, illustrating how mechanistic information can be obtained, organised, validated and disseminated.  The case study highlights the complexity of reaction networks involving surface intermediates, competing pathways and catalyst-specific effects, and demonstrates how an openly accessible, well-documented mechanism can support reproducibility, model comparison and further development by the wider catalysis and reaction-engineering communities.

Biography

Sergio Vernuccio is an Associate Professor in the School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at the University of Southampton.  His research activity employs a synergistic combination of computational and experimental approaches to unravel the kinetics of complex reacting systems for sustainable development, including catalytic processes, photochemical transformations, thermal decompositions.