Items Tagged With Catalysis

In industries from textiles to automobiles and from pharmaceuticals to semiconductors, accurately measuring empty spaces—technically speaking, porosity—is a substantial matter, important to efforts to ensure high product quality and low scrap rates.

Researchers at the US Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory have developed an advanced concept in nanoscale catalyst engineering—a combination of experiments and simulations that will bring polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells for hydrogen-powered vehicles closer to massive commercialisation.

The results of their findings identify a clear trend in the behaviour of extended and nanoscale surfaces of platinum-bimetallic alloy. Additionally, the techniques and concepts derived from the research programme are expected to make overarching contributions to other areas of science well beyond the focus on electrocatalysis.

Reactors that burn hydrogen or natural gas to generate energy can be dirty and dangerous. The mix of air with hydrogen or natural gas can explode easily if composition and temperature are not carefully controlled. And reactors often produce polluting byproducts. Now, University of Pittsburgh chemical engineering professor Goetz Veser has created a safer alternative—microreactors that won’t explode, no matter what the gas composition or how hot they get, and that can keep undesirable pollutants, like nitrogen oxides (NO_x), from forming. His results could be used to design processes for safe, clean energy production and hydrogen storage.

Development of new instrumentation and methods for studying the molecular mechanisms of enzymes are the goals of a three-year, $1.5 million contract awarded to Pacific Northwest National Laboratory by the Department of Energy’s energy biosciences programme.

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have made a discovery that could allow scientists to exercise more control over the catalytic activity of gold nanoclusters. The finding—that the dimensionality and structure, and thus the catalytic activity, of gold nanoclusters changes as the thickness of their supporting metal-oxide films is varied—is an important one in the rapidly developing field of nanotechnology. This and further advances in nanocatalysis may lead to lowering the cost of manufacturing materials from plastics to fertilisers. The research appeared in the 21 July 2006 issue of the journal Physical Review Letters.