Posts Tagged ‘Catalysis’
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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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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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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 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!
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October 13th, 2009
China and Gold Catalysis
The Yantai area of China is located at the Shandong Peninsula in the east of the country and it is the biggest base for production, mining and processing of gold, ranking the first in output and natural reserves of gold in China. There is another reason for Yantai to be associated with gold though - catalysis. I was glad to see this recent news, reporting the visit of Prof. Haruta to the Institute of Applied Catalysis of Yantai University. Professor Caixia Qi at Yantai University has been working on the use of gold as a catalyst for a good few years now. The Institute’s gold catalyst (YD-2) has already been applied in a protective gas mask device manufactured by Shanxi Ruishi Protective Technology Co. Ltd in Shanxi province. With improvements in longer-term durability (currently the focus of the research group), wider application in other air purification products should be achieved.
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October 5th, 2009
Gold catalysis papers in Angewandte Chemie
Angewandte Chemie, one of the most highly regarded chemistry-based journals, has recently published (or is about to publish via its ‘early view’ process) a number of excellent papers in the field of gold catalysis, further proof of the considerable excitement and interest in the field at the moment.The first comes from the labs of Masatake Haruta, and is titled ‘Propene Epoxidation with dioxygen catalysed by gold clusters’. As many of you will be aware, this is an important reaction as the product (methyloxirane) is a key building block for the manufacture of polyurethane, along with various other organic intermediates and solvents. Making methyloxirane cleanly and in good yield is not simple, and gold-based catalysis has long shown great potential in this important reaction, something furthered by Professor Haruta’s paper.
The second paper I spotted comes from the labs of Graham Hutchings in Cardiff. Here the team have shown enhanced catalytic activity of specific Au-Pd catalysts supported on TiO2 for the direct synthesis of H2O2 from H2 and O2.
Finally, Stephen Hashmi has penned a nice communication dealing with the liason of palladium and gold catalysts as a basis for a new class of cross-coupling reactions.
To me, each of these high quality papers is a clear indication of the strength of gold-based catalysis research at the moment.
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September 7th, 2009
Use of gold in diesel autocats
I was on holiday when Platinum Today provided their recent viewpoint on the use of gold in diesel autocats, but you can see their announcement here. Platinum Today also gave a viewpoint on Nanostellar’s technology almost two years ago, when this technology was in its infancy, although this doesn’t appear to be on their website any longer.
What is clear if you contrast their viewpoints, separated by almost two years, is that Nanostellar has made excellent progress in bringing it’s technology to market and that the wider precious metal industry is now recognising that gold does indeed have a viable role in automotive pollution control.
I am sure this is a topic you will be hearing a lot more about in the coming months………..
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September 2nd, 2009
Rice University does it again….
Rice University is making a habit of this. Developing innovative gold-based technologies that is. First we had Profs Naomi Halas and Jennifer West creating gold nanoshells for use in a range of biomedical applications, that has since been developed into the AuroShell product. Then Prof Michael Wong demonstrated the ability of Au-Pd nanoparticles to remove contaminants from groundwater (see video here). Now, Eugene Zubarev, associate professor in chemistry at Rice has created gold-platinum catalysts that are soluble enough for industrial use, but can also be easily removed from the manufactured product. See the press release from Rice University here.
The research is available online in the Sept. 1 issue of the German scientific journal Angewandte Chemie International Edition
Trevor Keel
Richard Holliday
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