to the Fundamental and Applied Catalysis Series Catalysis is important
academically and industrially. It plays an essential role in the
manufacture of a wide range of products, from gasoline and plastics to
fertilizers and herbicides, which would otherwise be unobtainable or
prohibitively expensive. There are few chemical-or oil-based material
items in modem society that do not depend in some way on a catalytic
stage in their manufacture. Apart from manu- facturing processes,
catalysis is finding other important and ever-increasing uses; for
example, successful applications of catalysis in the control of
pollution and its use in environmental control are certain to increase
in the future. The commercial importance of catalysis and the diverse
intellectual challenges of catalytic phenomena have stimulated study by
a broad spectrum of scientists, including chemists, physicists, chemical
engineers, and material scientists. Increas- ing research activity over
the years has brought deeper levels of understanding, and these have
been associated with a continually growing amount of published material.
As recently as sixty years ago, Rideal and Taylor could still treat the
subject comprehensively in a single volume, but by the 1950s Emmett
required six volumes, and no conventional multivolume text could now
cover the whole of catalysis in any depth. In view of this situation, we
felt there was a need for a collection of monographs, each one of which
would deal at an advanced level with a selected topic, so as to build a
catalysis reference library.
