Archive for the ‘Catalysis’ Category
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February 24th, 2010
A new gold centre of excellence?
On the way back to London from the Nano Tech 2010 event in Tokyo I was fortunate enough to spend a couple of days in the city of Yantai, which is situated in Shandong Province, China. Back in 2008 the World Gold Council supported the work of Caixia Qi, a professor of chemistry at the local university, for her exciting work in the field of gold catalysis. Her group is making great progress in identifying stable, highly effective gold catalysts for a range of applications based around the oxidation of carbon monoxide.The region is steeped in gold, quite literally. The area is dotted with gold mines, and is home to some of China’s largest gold mining companies. Everywhere you look the chinese symbol for gold (shown above) is prominent – it really is quite something.
During my brief stay, I met the president of the Yantai Gold Bureau and senior representatives of both the Shandong Zhaojin group (one of the largest gold mining companies in China) and Yantai University. The purpose of these meetings was to discuss the potential of forming a centre of excellence at Yantai University for research into new scientific and technological uses of gold. It transpired that all parties were fully supportive of the venture, including local government, meaning the centre will proceed under Professor Qi’s stewardship at the university.
This is a most exciting venture, bringing together considerable resource and expertise in the field. Here at the WGC we applaud the hard work and tenacity of Professor Qi in bringing the centre of excellence ever closer to fruition, and look forward to building on our already strong relationship in the future.
Update, 25th Feb 2010. Below is a picture of our delegation visiting the fantastic local gold musuem, where we all were able to pick up a 12.5kg bar of pure gold!
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February 12th, 2010
Gold for good – a new article from the WGC
Yesterday we released a new publication written by the World Gold Council and Cientifica called ‘Gold for good – gold and nanotechnology in the age of innovation’. The article, which is freely available on both the WGC and Cientifica websites, discusses the past, present and future of gold-based nanotechnology, focusing on key areas in medicine, the environment and technology.I am attending the 2010 Nanotech Japan event in Tokyo next week where I will be launching the article, and will follow this with a trip to the ACS spring meeting in California towards the end of March. Feel free to drop me a line if you are attending either event, I’d be happy to discuss any aspect of the WGCs activities, including our funding and investment programmes.
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January 25th, 2010
Science reports on green gold catalysis
The leading journal science has just published an article (and accompanying perspective) on the ever-increasing potential of gold in ‘green chemistry’. The article, a collaborative piece from teams in Germany and the USA, details the development of a new catalyst with a stable structure that is active without any support. This material has been shown to catalyse the selective oxidative coupling of methanol to methyl formate with high selectivity under extremely mild conditions.
The ‘perspective’ letter, written by well known Danish researchers in the field, highlights the real potential in this breakthrough. They discuss the importance of identifying efficient catalysts in the industrially vital field of oxidation reactions, and how gold may prove itself applicable to large scale processes in the future. This is definitely worth taking a look at if you’re working in the field.
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January 6th, 2010
Nature Nanotechnology feature article
Nature Nanotechnology, the leading journal which covers all aspects of nanotech-based research, has just published an excellent article on the ever-growing field of gold-based catalysis. The piece, entitled ‘A Golden Opportunity’, is particularly interesting as it focuses on the drive to commercialise gold-based catalysts, and features commentary and opinion from a number of eminent academic and industrial scientists including Chris Hardacre of Queens University Belfast, Graham Hutchings of Cardiff University, Jason McPherson of Mintek and David Barton of Dow Chemical Company amongst others.Here at the World Gold Council we are particularly excited to see the publication of this article in such an eminent journal. The tone of the piece certainly fits in with our aim of aiding the acceleration of gold-based technologies to market by providing marketing expertise and offering various funding strategies. For more information on our funding programmes, see here.
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December 23rd, 2009
Gold Bulletin online now
The latest issue of Gold Bulletin 42(4) has just been published online. This issue is a really special one – to acknowledge the magnificent contribution of Dr David Thompson to the development and promotion of the science of gold catalysis. David, co-author of the book Catalysis by Gold and Technical Editor of Gold Bulletin worked tirelessly in this field for many years. A full appreciation of his life can be found here.Blogging will be a bit lighter over the next week or so, with Christmas and the New year celebrations…
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December 21st, 2009
New Book – Gold Science and Applications
I’m excited to announce that a new book ‘Gold – Science and Applications’ has now been published.
There have been many excellent books written on certain aspects of the science and technology of gold, most notably the book of the Hanau gold conference, held in 1996 (“Gold. Progress in Chemistry, Biochemistry and Technology”, edited by Hubert Schmidbaur and published in 1999) and there are several new books covering specific sectors of gold science e.g. on catalysis, chemistry and nanotechnology (see here). However, for those seeking a broader reference source on gold and covering all technical sectors, the most appropriate book on gold, Gold Usage by Bill Rapson and Theo Groenewald, was published over 30 years ago in 1978. The world of gold has changed considerably since then. A few years ago Chris Corti and I believed it was time for an updated book that reflects the more recent developments.
With the co-operation of some of the leading experts in their field, we have attempted to produce a book that is a worthy successor to ‘Rapson’ and to provide an authoritive source of information. We have attempted to cover all the main scientific areas as well as the main areas of application. In some cases this has required some very detailed scientific chapters; other fields require less specific detail and have focused more on the practical application. In addition, to help readers place this science and technology in the context of a much wider gold market, a chapter on the supply, demand and pricing of gold is included. Taken together, our aim for the book is to appeal to both those working in academia and industry.
If you are interested, your can read more and purchase it here .
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December 16th, 2009
Angewandte Chemie gold
Angewandte Chemie, the field leading journal of the German Chemical Society, often carries high quality gold-related articles (indeed, I have commented on this before). However, recently they have gone a step further with the publication of 5 excellent communications and articles in a single issue! What really struck me about this was the sheer diversity of the work - there is a catalysis paper from Masatake Haruta, a GNP-based DNA detection offering from Jin Zhu at Nanjing University and the cover illustration (see left) which was taken from a gold nanorod paper written by Luis M. Liz-Marzán in Vigo.A fantastic illustration of the strength and depth of gold-based research at the moment.
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November 6th, 2009
Linking catalyst properties to particle size
This weeks edition of Science carries a nice paper entitled Electronic Structure Controls Reactivity of Size-Selected Pd Clusters Adsorbed on TiO2 Surfaces. What the authors, based at the University of Utah, have demonstrated is the first conclusive link between the size of catalyst particles on a solid surface, their electronic properties and their ability to speed up chemical reactions.
This is an important paper indeed. Take gold as an example – it’s pretty expensive stuff, as are all of the noble metals employed as catalysts. If, say, 50% of a precious metal catalyst is in fact inactive/poorly active because the particles are not of an optimal size then that adds up to a lot of wasted gold. A better understanding of the link between particle size and activity will undoubtedly make for more efficient (both chemically and economically!) catalysts
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October 28th, 2009
Using plasmons to study gold catalysts
Some nice work described here on Physics World, using plasmons to study gold catalyst activity…..
UPDATE – Oops! Its just been pointed out that although gold was used in the experimental technique the catalyst was actually platinum.
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October 22nd, 2009
AZoNano’s Thought Leaders
I recently highlighted AZoNano’s excellent series ‘Thought Leaders’. Another in this series again deals with gold; explaining how a nickel steam reforming catalyst can be improved though gold alloying additions and a potential way to improve the stability of gold catalysts on titania supports. Its definitely worth keeping an eye on this series – good quality stuff!
Trevor Keel
Richard Holliday
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