Liquid Platinum At Room Temperature: The 'Cool' Catalyst For a Sustainable Revolution In Industrial Chemistry

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.

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