Noble Metal

By Milica Folić, Product Line Director | Clean Fuels & Chemicals, Topsoe and  Maria Jesus Lorences Perez, Senior Product Line Director | Hydrotreating Catalyst, Topsoe Special to The Digest For over a century, refineries have mastered the art of processing fossil fuels. However, the emerging field of converting renewable feedstocks into transportation fuels, such as […]

Scientists may have found a way to boost the efficiency of a dirt-cheap alternative to silicon.

Gold is a noble element - one that is so chemically stable that it is found untarnished in the ground. But under some conditions, it can be converted to gold salts, which were the standard of care for rheumatoid arthritis. But gold salts, which are quite toxic, and been replaced with a number of superior immunosuppressive drugs over the past two decades. The Golden Age of gold salts is over.

Pyroelectric catalysis (pyro-catalysis) can convert environmental temperature fluctuations into clean chemical energy, such as hydrogen. However, compared with the more common catalysis strategy, such as photocatalysis, pyro-catalysis is inefficient due to slow temperature changes in the ambient environment.

In light of vehicular pollutants contributing to decreasing air quality, governments across the globe are posing stricter emission regulations for automobiles. This calls for the development of more efficient exhaust gas after-treatment systems, which are systems to "clean" exhaust gas before it is released into the atmosphere).

Hydrogen has attracted extensive attention from academia and industry as an energy source due to its intrinsic environmental compatibility, abundance, and high energy density (120 MJ kg−1). Electrocatalytic water splitting is an environmentally friendly route to produce hydrogen, especially when the electricity is from renewable sources that minimize carbon dioxide emissions throughout the process.

The key to chemical reactions is in the name—there needs to be something that causes the chemicals to react to one another. Called a catalyst, this component induces or speeds up reactions in a controlled manner to produce a desired outcome. The catalysts used in several industries are often composed of noble metals, which are not efficient enough to compensate for their high cost. To address this issue for the…

Utilization of biomass as the basic feedstock for the production and chemicals and energy storage has been demonstrated to be an important alternative to achieve sustainable society, which has attracted increasing interests in both academic and industrial communities for decades.

A sustainable route to green hydrogen production is becoming possible through the use of efficient electrocatalysts in research by Texas A&M University chemical engineering professor Dr. Abdoulaye Djire.

Silicon, the standard semiconducting material used in a host of applications—computer central processing units (CPUs), semiconductor chips, detectors, and solar cells—is an abundant, naturally occurring material. However, it is expensive to mine and to purify.

Single-atom catalysts are prized because of the way they maximize the use of active sites and because they have easy tunability. However, in most conventional single-atom catalysts, the active sites are buried in the thick microporous supports, resulting in low accessibility of the active sites, leading to low catalytic activity. A team of scientists has constructed a macroporous structure that provides enhanced…

The abundant carbon on Earth might offer a rich, renewable resource for clean, sustainable energy. The technology—called carbon-based electrochemical catalysis—that could make green energy conversion possible exists, according to an international collaboration investigating recent advancements, but is not ready for broad application.

Developing low-cost and stable metal electrodes is crucial for mass production of perovskite solar cells (PSCs). As an earth-abundant element, Cu becomes an alternative candidate to replace noble metal electrodes such as Au and Ag, due to its comparable physiochemical properties with simultaneously good stability and low cost. However, the undesirable band alignment associated with the device architecture impedes…

As a result of corrosion, copper and silver release positively charged ions into their environment, which are harmful to bacteria in several ways and prevent their growth or kill them completely. This effect has long been exploited, for example by coating implants with these metals to prevent bacterial infections. There are some tricks that can be employed to release even more ions and intensify this effect. For…

In recent years, the golden word in precious metals is palladium.

Selective oxidation of methane (CH4) to value-added chemicals with both high catalytic activity and selectivity under mild conditions remains challenging. Due to the low activity of oxygen and the overoxidation of the oxygenates, selective oxidation of CH4 to oxygenates with O2 or O2/H2 suffers from low catalytic activity and low oxygenates selectivity. Moreover, the high loading of noble metals for supported…

Noble metals have been widely used as heterogeneous catalysts because they easily stand out with high activity and selectivity for many reactions of both scientific and industrial interest. At least a century ago, some light alloying elements with small atomic radii were known to easily permeate into the interstitial location of a metal lattice. The catalytic performance of noble metals has also been found to be…

Surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) is a powerful fingerprint analysis and detection technique that plays an important role in the fields of food safety, environmental protection, bio-imaging and hazardous substance identification. Electromagnetic enhancement (EM) and chemical enhancement (CM) are the two recognized mechanisms of action for amplifying Raman signals.

Hydrogen (H2) is a clean carbon-free fuel with high gravimetric energy density and emerges as an attractive alternative to the unrenewable fossil resource. Photocatalytic water splitting over a semiconductor provides a promising economical and environmentally friendly route to convert unlimited solar energy to H2.

The so-called three-way catalytic converter in the exhaust system of a car consists of expensive materials and only works correctly when the exhaust gases have a temperature that is several hundred degrees Celsius.