Liquid Platinum At Room Temperature: The 'Cool' Catalyst For a Sustainable Revolution In Industrial Chemistry (phys.org) 20
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Researchers in Australia have been able to use trace amounts of liquid platinum to create cheap and highly efficient chemical reactions at low temperatures, opening a pathway to dramatic emissions reductions in crucial industries. When combined with liquid gallium, the amounts of platinum required are small enough to significantly extend the earth's reserves of this valuable metal, while potentially offering more sustainable solutions for CO2 reduction, ammonia synthesis in fertilizer production, and green fuel cell creation, together with many other possible applications in chemical industries. These findings, which focus on platinum, are just a drop in the liquid metal ocean when it comes to the potential of these catalysis systems. By expanding on this method, there could be more than 1,000 possible combinations of elements for over 1,000 different reactions.
Platinum is very effective as a catalyst (the trigger for chemical reactions) but is not widely used at industrial scale because it's expensive. Most catalysis systems involving platinum also have high ongoing energy costs to operate. Normally, the melting point for platinum is 1,700C. And when it's used in a solid state for industrial purposes, there needs to be around 10% platinum in a carbon-based catalytic system. It's not an affordable ratio when trying to manufacture components and products for commercial sale. That could be set to change in the future, though, after scientists at UNSW Sydney and RMIT University found a way to use tiny amounts of platinum to create powerful reactions, and without expensive energy costs.
The team, including members of the ARC Center of Excellence in Exciton Science and the ARC Center of Excellence in Future Low Energy Technologies, combined the platinum with liquid gallium, which has a melting point of just 29.8C -- that's room temperature on a hot day. When combined with gallium, the platinum becomes soluble. In other words, it melts, and without firing up a hugely powerful industrial furnace. For this mechanism, processing at an elevated temperature is only required at the initial stage, when platinum is dissolved in gallium to create the catalysis system. And even then, it's only around 300C for an hour or two, nowhere near the continuous high temperatures often required in industrial-scale chemical engineering. The results have been published in the journal Nature Chemistry.
Platinum is very effective as a catalyst (the trigger for chemical reactions) but is not widely used at industrial scale because it's expensive. Most catalysis systems involving platinum also have high ongoing energy costs to operate. Normally, the melting point for platinum is 1,700C. And when it's used in a solid state for industrial purposes, there needs to be around 10% platinum in a carbon-based catalytic system. It's not an affordable ratio when trying to manufacture components and products for commercial sale. That could be set to change in the future, though, after scientists at UNSW Sydney and RMIT University found a way to use tiny amounts of platinum to create powerful reactions, and without expensive energy costs.
The team, including members of the ARC Center of Excellence in Exciton Science and the ARC Center of Excellence in Future Low Energy Technologies, combined the platinum with liquid gallium, which has a melting point of just 29.8C -- that's room temperature on a hot day. When combined with gallium, the platinum becomes soluble. In other words, it melts, and without firing up a hugely powerful industrial furnace. For this mechanism, processing at an elevated temperature is only required at the initial stage, when platinum is dissolved in gallium to create the catalysis system. And even then, it's only around 300C for an hour or two, nowhere near the continuous high temperatures often required in industrial-scale chemical engineering. The results have been published in the journal Nature Chemistry.
Gallium is awesome. (Score:3)
Check out Gallium vs. Aluminum: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Gallium Nitride power supplies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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I bought 100 grams of gallium on Amazon and gave it to my kids for Christmas.
They loved it. None of their friends got gallium for Christmas.
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Rotometals usually has the best gallium prices. And you can get ingots of pure tin there too!
Never mind chemistry. (Score:3)
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This is a huge leap in inorganic Chemistry (Score:4, Interesting)
Low temp Platinum catalyst reactions are a Holy Grail of sorts in Industrial Chem. This is going to be revolutionary, bringing costs down to affordability for the masses for all sorts of things.
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Sure, when they've worked out the kinks of productizing this. (Sourcing, manufacturing, distribution, storage, harsh weather conditions, etc.)
This is pretty much like the annual "amazing battery breakthroughs" we read about. Not that they are bogus, but that it's just a first step, and there are many more required before it comes into common use. And the product can die along any of those steps.
Sounds helpful in hydrocarbon fuel synthesis (Score:4, Interesting)
An R&D team in the US Navy has been working on fuel synthesis for a long time and as I recall there's been a problem finding low cost and durable catalysts for their seawater-to-jetfuel process. This may prove helpful.
There's a lot of people working on this problem because hydrocarbon fuels have a lot of great properties but the current source, petroleum crude, has many political and economic problems associated with them right now. The airlines and aircraft makers want carbon neutral synthesized hydrocarbon fuels to improve their PR image. Motorsports have a similar PR problem that carbon neutral synthesized hydrocarbons would solve. The US Navy has concerns beyond the PR issue, but the possibility of being carbon neutral is certainly helpful. Space exploration needs working hydrocarbon synthesis for a practical crewed mission to Mars, and it could also help for missions to the moon.
These efforts go by different names but the goals and processes they are investigating are all very much alike. They can go by names like e-gasoline, e-diesel, or electrofuel when the goal is carbon neutral alternatives for transportation fuel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
When used to pipe fuel to homes for heating, cooking, etc, in place of natural gas they can be called power-to-gas, syngas or synthesis gas, renewable natural gas, substitute natural gas, grid energy storage, hydrogen economy, methane economy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
When trying to get people from one rock in the solar system to another it might be called in situ resource utilization.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
I have to wonder if it isn't the US Navy that is furthest along on making this practical. It sounds like they started field trials under the Trump administration. That means Nimitz class aircraft carriers with the capability to produce jet fuel at sea for the aircraft it carries. Expand that to other ships by giving them a nuclear power plant and fuel synthesis then there is no need for an oil tanker to come to the fleet. They will still need to replenish the ship at sea but then if there's no fuel to move then replenishment could be by air. Potentially semi-autonomous without crew. In a natural disaster the new nuclear navy with furl synthesis can bring the fuel ashore for local emergency vehicles to use.
We aren't getting rid of hydrocarbon fuels any time soon. Anything that can get us there without drilling in the dirt for it would be a game changer
I'm sure applications for use in making fertilizer, fuel cells, catalytic converters, and such will make waves too.
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Yea, so the thing about hydrocarbon fuels, especially gasoline, is that they are exceptionally good at (a) storing energy and (b) being easy to handle safely. Those two properties have lead to, for example, self-serve fuel stations. We probably won't ever have that with hydrogen. The energy transfer rate with fuels is in the MW range when refilling, something that we might never see with electrics, unless you talk about swapping battery packs.
Gallium is corrosive, though (Score:5, Interesting)
Gallium has a tendency to infiltrate itself in the crystal lattice of other metals and cause embrittlement and corrosion by weakening the bonds between the other metal's microcrystals. Which leads to the other metal disintegrating into a powder. Most metals are susceptible to that action.
Also it wets most other, non-metallic materials and wicks into them if they have any porosity at all, creeping up walls by capillary action and having a tendency to escape most systems that would contain other liquids.
Finding a way to keep the gallium-platinum alloy contained in a way that it can still perform its catalytic action without causing any damage will be quite challenging.
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Finding a way to keep the gallium-platinum alloy contained in a way that it can still perform its catalytic action without causing any damage will be quite challenging.
If it significantly reduces the amount of platinum required (which is guaranteed to increase in price) then it will be a worthwhile monetary investment. Every thing else is expendable compared to your most expensive elements.
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If it significantly reduces the amount of platinum required (which is guaranteed to increase in price)
You are investing in platinum futures then? Commodity investments that are guaranteed are few and far between.
The price of platinum in non-inflation adjusted dollars is half what it was 13 years ago, and has been effectively flat for 7 years. Platinum mining operations are shutting down due to falling demand in its major market - catalytic converters.
It is a solution, not liquid platinum (Score:2)
Not trying to minimize the research, which looks like it could be a highly useful and was accurately represented in the source article. But the Slashdot article title is incorrect.
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Abstract:
Insights into metal–matrix interactions in atomically dispersed catalytic systems are necessary to exploit the true catalytic activity of isolated metal atoms. Distinct from catalytic atoms spatially se