This breakthrough could potentially lead to energy savings, greener industrial processes, and more energy-efficient catalysts.
- Apr 18, 2023, 11:00 AM CDT
University of Wisconsin-Madison chemical engineers have developed a model of how catalytic reactions work at the atomic scale. Manos Mavrikakis, a professor of chemical and biological engineering at UW-Madison who led the research said, “If you decrease the temperatures at which you have to run these reactions by only a few degrees, there will be an enormous decrease in the energy demand that we face as humanity today. By decreasing the energy needs to run all these processes, you are also decreasing their environmental footprint.
Mavrikakis explained, “The prevailing assumption is that these metal atoms are strongly bonded to each other and simply provide ‘landing spots’ for reactants. What everybody has assumed is that metal-metal bonds remain intact during the reactions they catalyze.
Their experimental collaborators at the University of California, Berkeley, used atomically-resolved scanning tunneling microscopy to look at carbon monoxide adsorption on nickel , a stable, crystalline form of nickel useful in catalysis. Their experiments confirmed models that showed various defects in the structure of the catalyst can also influence how single metal atoms pop loose, as well as how reaction sites form.
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