Perfecting Catalytic Arrays AUGUST 13, 2009 Catalysts speed up
chemical reactions and remain largely unchanged themselves at
the end of the process. This apparently simple statement harbors
a chemical secret: Catalysts are much more complicated than
that. Now, work carried out at the Argonne Advanced Photon
Source (APS), Center for Nanoscale Materials (CNM), and Electron
Microscopy Center (EMC) for Materials Research could improve our
understanding of at least one class of industrially important
catalyst: metal nanoparticle catalysts. Chemists can disperse
metal nanoparticles on high-surface-area support materials to
produce an enormous area of catalyst to interact with the
starting materials in a reaction mixture. This allows those
materials to come together very readily, to then react and
transform into large quantities of product with little waste.
The added advantage of this type of catalyst is that it can
reduce the need for energy-intensive pressurization or high
temperatures. In other words, it can mak