Protecting our limited resources of precious metals with recent chemical discoveries »

Protecting our limited resources of precious metals with recent chemical discoveries

The world’s market is saturated with diamonds and gold for their value and their beauty and people pay through the nose for them while manufacturers pay for advertising. Jewelry retailers in Australia may go through a digital marketing agency in Sydney or Melbourne, but the key point is that they get their message across and their customers flock to their stores. However, precious metals are not only for decoration, they are also highly useful in chemical engineering, specifically, creating catalysts.

Traditionally, catalysts require gold, platinum, or palladium for construction and the global market that requires catalysts for everything from pharmaceuticals to agrochemicals is putting a strain on dwindling supplies of precious metals. Fortunately, the research team at the University of Nottingham have devised a new method of creating catalysts without the need for gold or any other precious metals. Catalysts are a compound or element that is capable of enabling an increased reaction in other substances without being consumed. However, optimising each atom is a challenge, and precious metals were the most powerful catalysts prior to this discovery. The downside is that the properties of the metal can cause it to mutate at the macroscale. Catalysts are divided into two types: homogeneous, or heterogeneous. Homogeneous catalysts are more active but heterogeneous catalysts are more durable. The scientists from the research time were able to create a new catalyst that fuses both of these features together in order to come up with a more sustainable option going forward. Led by Dr Jesum Alves Fenandes, Propulsion Futures Beacon Nottingham Research Fellow from the School of Chemistry, the team will be able to further grow the potential of chemical catalysts, which will enable future understanding of how to make molecules in the most effective way possible. According to Fenandes, “We use the most direct way to make nanoclusters, by simply kicking out the atoms from bulk metal by a beam of fast ions of argon — a method called magnetron sputtering. Usually, this method is used for making coatings or films, but we tuned it to produce metal nanoclusters that can be deposited on almost any surface. Importantly, the nanocluster size can be controlled precisely by experimental parameters, from [a] single atom to a few nanometres, so that an array of uniform nanoclusters can be generated on demand within seconds.” His colleague, Dr Andreas Weilhard, a Green Chemicals Beacon postdoc researcher elaborated by explaining that metals have a high catalytic potential for increased activity because they are highly active and by far the most accessible material known to man-kind with this kind of reactive nature. When it comes to how their new discover can help preserve our limited resources, Professor Peter Licence, the director of the GSK Carbon Neutral Laboratory at the University of Nottingham explained that their method of catalyst fabrication have no need for “solvents or chemical reagents, thus generating very low levels of waste, which is an increasingly important factor for green chemical technologies.” Their innovation means that processes that require a catalyst will have a new and cleaner option without sacrificing anything from efficiency to cost, but rather, the new mode of catalytic production will be able to increase the output at a far cheaper rate, considering that it doesn’t require any use of precious metals.