Industries that use catalysts around the world use at least 10 percent of the world’s energy. The discovery of a new catalyst can reduce this energy use.
Nationalgeographic.co.id—Chemists at the University of Wisconsin at Madison are developing a new catalyst that could save the world massive energy. This is a new breakthrough resulting from computational chemistry research.
They developed a model of how catalytic reactions work on the atomic scale. This understanding allows engineers and chemists to develop more efficient catalysts and improve industrial processes.
The findings have the potential to provide enormous energy savings, given that 90 percent of the products we encounter in our lives are produced, at least in part, using catalysis.
Catalysts speed up chemical reactions without changing themselves. They are essential for the refining of petroleum products and for the manufacture of pharmaceuticals, plastics, food additives, fertilizers, eco-friendly fuels, industrial chemicals, and more.
Scientists and engineers have spent decades perfecting catalytic reactions, but it is currently not possible to directly observe them at the extreme temperatures and pressures often involved in industrial-scale catalysis.
They don’t know exactly what happens on the nano and atomic scales. This new research helps unravel the mystery with the potential to have major ramifications for the industry.
In fact, just three catalytic reactions, steam-methane reforming to produce hydrogen, ammonia synthesis to produce fertilizer, and methanol synthesis use up nearly 10% of the world’s energy.
With this finding, the new catalyst can reduce energy use in the world by up to 10 percent. And that is a very large number and can have far-reaching implications.
“If you lowered the temperature at which you have to run these reactions by just a few degrees, there would be a huge reduction in the energy demands that we face today,” said Manos Mavrikakis, a professor of chemical and biological engineering at UW-Madison who led the research.
“By reducing the energy requirement to carry out all of these processes, you also reduce their environmental footprint.”
Mavrikakis and postdoctoral researchers Lang Xu and Konstantinos G. Papanikolaou along with graduate student Lisa Je published news of their progress in the journal Science recently.
The journal is published under the title “Formation of active sites on transition metals through reaction-driven migration of surface atoms” which can be obtained online.
